Chris Hodge, "Tower of Babel"

RECOMMENDED

Attending an Apocalypse-themed art show is one way to start the new year, particularly if you follow the Mayan Calendar. Six artists’ responses to the subject are currently on view in “Wipe Out!” at Peanut Gallery.

Upon entering, one is confronted with a large white tree. Made of paper and found materials, the installation runs floor to ceiling along one corner of the gallery. Along the structure, bulbous clear plastic shapes disrupt its trunk. The edges fade into the surrounding walls, but the tree itself invades the gallery space, raising questions about its significance. An explanatory text can be found around the corner, paired with two framed fragments of the tree. This is Andrea Jablonski and Merje Veski’s conceived vision of a post-apocalyptic world: a barren landscape, with what the artists note are “Pompeian-like figures” melted into the body of the tree. Standing alone, the tree left me wanting a larger installation to truly immerse in their imagined world. Read the rest of this entry »

Karl Wirsum, "Shoestring Query Can’t Beggars be Shoe-Z," 2006

By Bert Stabler

There is a lot up in the air right now regarding city support for the arts in general, and visual arts in particular—and there are reasons to be nervous. The exhibitions at the Cultural Center, both in the upstairs spaces and in the Michigan Avenue Galleries, are set for 2012. But, as the year rolls onward, the mists of 2013 will begin to clear, in response to the various obstacles and question marks brought about by the restructuring of the Department of Cultural Affairs (DCA) in 2011.

Before departing office, Mayor Daley initiated a massive reorganization of cultural agencies, putting basically everything, including the Mayor’s Office of Special Events, under the nominal oversight of Cultural Affairs—now the Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events. Cultural programming positions were reduced and moved from Cultural Affairs into the Chicago Office of Tourism and Culture (COTC), a separate not-for-profit that had been jointly handling programming with DCA for visual art, music, dance and theater, as well as administering cultural grants. Now positions are being reduced and moved again, this time back under city administration proper, to be filled after a new deputy commissioner for arts programming is named, which should happen in the next couple of months. Read the rest of this entry »

Dimitre

RECOMMENDED

What do angels look like in our modern-day world? This was the question that Chris Jackson and Laura Lee Junge posted on ChicagoArtistsResource.org, and their Jackson Junge Gallery is now showing the paintings, drawings, sculpture and photographs of twenty of the artists who responded. Junge is herself one of the artists on display, and not surprisingly many of the pieces share her “wouldn’t it be nice if…” approach to the subject. Read the rest of this entry »

Heather Rasmussen, "Untitled (New Orleans, Louisiana, September 10, 2005)," 2010

RECOMMENDED

Fascinated by the colorful and ruthlessly rectangular shipping crates that festoon California ports, Heather Rasmussen took to making miniature paper replicas of them; arranged her constructions to simulate documented accidents in which piles of containers crashed into each other, collapsed, or scattered in a mess; and shot her scenarios in color, leaving out any trace of context. Read the rest of this entry »

John Neff Prints Robert Blanchon at Golden Gallery

Top 5 Exhibitions of 2011
John Neff, Golden Gallery
Jeff Carter at Crown Hall
Mark Booth, ADDS DONNA
Dianna Frid, Devening Projects + Editions
Crime Unseen, Museum of Contemporary Photography
—Jason Foumberg

Top 5 Painting Exhibitions of 2011
Andrew Holmquist, Carrie Secrist Gallery
Michelle Bolinger, Northeastern Illinois University Art Gallery
Elsa Muñoz, National Museum of Mexican Art
John Henley, Slow gallery
Luminous Ground: Artists With Histories, Illinois State Museum
—Jason Foumberg Read the rest of this entry »

It is tempting to take the temperature of today’s cultural climate by sticking a finger in the cold past. How do we compare to those who triumphed before us? Is the past our tradition, our culture? But the things that grow in shadows are strange, and there is no darker shadow than the one cast from someone else’s departed golden age.

The New Art Examiner, an art-criticism newspaper and then a magazine published in Chicago from 1973 to 2002, has recently been collected into an edited anthology called “The Essential New Art Examiner,” which contains thirty-seven selections from its roller-coaster run through Chicago’s contemporary art landscape and insightful reflections from five of the publication’s editors. This King James version of the New Art Examiner condenses the battles of the old guard into a doctrine of Chicago’s signature art styles and controversies. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

After eight years away from the copper plates, Tony Fitzpatrick has bought a new press, hired a master printer and staff, and is back in the printmaking business with two new, complementary series of multicolor etchings. As with his designs for collage, he starts with a big evocative figure in the center and then works out to the edges with the horror vacui of a medieval monk, compulsively free-associating to fill in the margins with energetic patterns that carry the mood of his story. His art is about life, not the art world, and it follows his endless exploration of what’s going on—in Chicago, Mexico, New Orleans, Japan or wherever else his voracious curiosity has led him. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

Between 1990 and 2001, Chicago’s gifted and gutsy documentary photographer Lloyd DeGrane went on the adventure of his life, going inside the walls of Cook County Jail and Stateville Correctional Center near Joliet, shooting the entire world of incarceration from beginning to end, from the captors to the captives, and from the grinding oppressive tedium to the specks of creativity and wisdom. Read the rest of this entry »

Damon Shell

RECOMMENDED

Among the eighteen accomplished Chicago photographers displaying their “favorite images” here in a variety of straight genres, the most abstract pieces are the standouts, preparing us to take some comfort and even joy in the blustery days that loom ahead. Remember last February’s blizzard. Damon Shell lets us relive it blissfully with his color studies of cars thickly coated with fresh white snow from which a taillight, windshield wiper or the hint of a windshield sometimes peeks through to create an entrancing composition. Then turn to Alan Teller’s dense and involving color abstractions of shards of ice amid bare twigs, dead leaves, and brown grass at the Ryerson Conservation Area near Deerfield, and you will find some redemption for all of the slips and stumbles of outrageous winter. Read the rest of this entry »

Dennis Oppenheim, "Stage 1 and 2. Reading Position for 2nd Degree Burn Long Island. N.Y.," 1970.

By Monica Westin

In my notes for the exhibition “Light Years,” I scrawled to myself that of the multitude of photographs and other lens-based work in the Art Institute’s ambitious show of photo-conceptualism, half a dozen or more involve scenes of beaches. Jan Dibbets’ careful formal studies of tides and waves in photography and film bookend the show. Beaches also appear in more playful work like John Baldessari’s “California Map Project” and Eleanor Antin’s “100 Boots.” And Dennis Oppenheim’s “Stage 1 and 2. Reading Position for 2nd Degree Burn Long Island. N.Y.” documents the artist self-inducing a sunburn with a book on his chest while lying in the sand, treating his body like a kind of raw photographic plate to be exposed by the sunlight. A consideration of these images alone suggests not only the scope of this show but also this reviewer’s psychological need to focus, at times, on a single motif so as to keep from feeling utterly overwhelmed by an exhibition this big, which makes a strong argument about a decisive watershed moment in art history. Read the rest of this entry »