Ulysses Davis in front of his barber shop/Photo: Roland L. Freeman

By Monica Westin

Ulysses Davis is not an outsider artist.

The Savannah, Georgia-based barber, who died in 1990, very much saw himself as an artist, knowing the value of keeping his collection of sixty years’ worth of carvings together—most of which he created during his downtime at the Savannah Barbershop where he cut hair. The interest in hair shows in Davis’ figural busts, including his most famous grouping of every American president from George Washington to the first George Bush. Davis’ passion for history extends to Nigerian wood-carving traditions. And as clear as it is from Davis’ current retrospective at Intuit that the artist was self-taught, it was that self-awareness of his art that sets him apart from the artists often tagged as “outsiders.” In any case, the collection is worthy of showing at any museum (which it was, in 1980, at the Corcoran Gallery), leading Janet Petry, Intuit’s chair of Exhibits Committee, to point out that the work of Intuit, which champions “intuitive and outsider art,” is something of a catch-22; by trying to mainstream the work of self-taught artists, the institution undermines the very distinction on which it was founded.

Petry points out that “outsider” is no longer a stigma—to the point that both she and Cleo Wilson, executive director of Intuit, are starting to see trained artists of all backgrounds brand themselves as outsiders. Wilson remarks that she’s seen an increase in people calling themselves “outsider artists” trying to donate work to Intuit. “Interesting to see what comes,” she says, casting a wary eye at the prospect of the rising tide of self-proclaimers. But if outsiders cannot dub themselves as such, who does? When I ask Wilson about how new outsider artists are found, she tells me there will always be undiscovered garages somewhere, but she also warns that there are more imposters than before. Where ”outsiderness” was once a fantasy of its insider proponents, its invocation by those who want to be in—or out—is yet another sign of the death of the movement. What began as a sincere interest in promoting the art of under-represented artists has now become a locus for fetishization, and—perhaps more disturbingly—a promotional gimmick. Read the rest of this entry »

There’s that one movie about love that just opened. It’s still too cold for a romantic walk along the lake. There’s always the failsafe of cooking for that special someone. Or there’s that new happening that’s been popping up in various cities: scavenger hunts.

Inside the Art Institute on this Valentine’s Day, about ten teams of two go over their scavenger-hunt clues atop the grand staircase. Ella, one of the hunt’s guides, briefs the participants. She laughs after the word “competition,” and judging from the teams’ expressions, this is one of those “it’s the journey not the destination” events.

At 11am, the teams go in their separate directions as part of the “Naked at the Art Museum Scavenger Hunt.” No one runs and, in fact, Team Wicked Art makes a quick stop at the coat check before heading off to the African collection. Read the rest of this entry »

Upon attending the opening of Richard Rezac’s third solo show at Rhona Hoffman, I remembered how old I am.

Like many of my peers, I consider Rezac’s work inseparable from the mythology of Minimalism, a period of art history we simply did not experience, born too late. While our pilgrimages to Marfa may help us to feel more acquainted with this period, Minimalism is our ornery grandfather whose offspring founded IKEA and gave birth to a breed of infidels with limited concern for geometry. By the time we came to cognition, people weren’t arguing about rectangles anymore. Everyone seemed so worried about AIDS, crack and the Gulf War, that splitting hairs over formalism didn’t seem to make sense anymore. Recently, we found credence in a group of artists dubbed “Unmonumental,” or post-Minimalism part two, precisely because it contaminated the sensibilities of a generation of artists we never fully understood.

Richard Rezac, however, grew up during the height of most monumental of all Minimalism; Carl Andre and Walter De Maria surely became Apollonian idols of the artist as a young man, but his work over the last three decades is not a mere placeholder in this clearly living history. Between works newly installed in the Art Institute’s Modern Wing and the solo show at Rhona Hoffman, Rezac demonstrates an ongoing inquiry into the geometries of environments ranging from Baroque cathedrals to a child’s bedroom.   Read the rest of this entry »

Top 5 Museum Shows
Olafur Eliasson, Museum of Contemporary Art
Your Pal, Cliff: Selections from the H.C. Westermann Study Collection, Smart Museum
Paul Chan, Renaissance Society
Mary Lou Zelazny, Hyde Park Art Center
James Castle: A Retrospective, Art Institute of Chicago
—Jason Foumberg

Top 5 Gallery Shows
Rob Carter, Ebersmoore Gallery
Big Youth, Corbett vs. Dempsey
Sarah Krepp, Roy Boyd Gallery
Everybody! Visual resistance in feminist health movements, 1969-2009, I Space
Ali Bailey, Golden Gallery
—Jason Foumberg Read the rest of this entry »

This year the Art Institute is celebrating the 125th birthday of one of its most beloved paintings, Georges Seurat’s “A Sunday on La Grande Jatte—1884.” The museum’s new promotion allows anyone to adopt dots on the painting. “We were brainstorming on how to engage members and stir visitors,” says Amy Radick, Director of Annual Giving at the Art Institute. “It’s such an iconic painting here at the museum.” Adoption fees, which are accompanied by a commemorative button in one of six colors, are $10 for one dot, $25 for three dots and $50 for all six. “It’s a great way to raise money in a year when museums are becoming more innovative with their fundraising,” says Radick. “So far we’ve had a really good response. This is a fun stocking stuffer at an affordable price to help the museum’s conservation efforts.” Dots are available for purchase in person at the museum.

By Jason Foumberg

Jin Lee, "Ice 2," 2008. Courtesy devening projects + editions, Chicago

Art is long, but institutional memory is short. In many ways, Chicago’s art history is written as it occurs, in situ, by the people who produce it. Artists toil in their studios, heads-down. Apartment galleries open and close as briskly as the seasons change. We consume one-night-only events by the half-dozen, like so many bottles of free Grolsch beer. Even as new art blogs proliferate, with more scenes being represented than ever before, the snapshot commentary and weekly content often feels dated by week’s end. And yet, paintings aren’t bubblegum summer jams; they’re codified slabs of culture, philosophy and style. We seek dialogue, inspiration and long-term change. In short, we seek longevity, with lasting importance for our work and our peers’—but who has time to write contemporary history while we’re in the midst of making it?

That said, Chicago loves its art history. Outsiders, Imagists, Modernists and firebrands—memorize their precepts and you’re halfway to an MFA degree (however, please don’t leave Chicago once you earn the other half). Our traditions always feel in danger of becoming tinder for the next great fire, so we hand-cobble our history and share the stories orally like a rite of passage. This is to our strength and our detriment. History is our bind. We don’t trash Paschke or cold-shoulder Mies because we’ve worked so hard to carry their legacies. In many global art centers, successive generations of artists break with the past like rebellious teenagers, but Chicagoans do not. Here, innovation comes from influence and education. Doing otherwise, it would feel as if the whole thing could unravel.

As we approach the end of the century’s first decade, it’s time to take census of our situation. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

It’s not surprising that the strong, simple woodblock prints of Unichi Hiratsuka (1895-1997) would appeal so much to Chicago structural engineer Theodore Van Zelst (1923-2009) whose family just donated his collection to the Art Institute. The artist’s grandfather was an architect, and the sense of gravity weighs heavily on the grandson’s bold depictions of earth and buildings, while the collector innovated the study of soil for its load-bearing potential. Hiratsuka was an innovator as well, being among the founders of Sosaku Hanga and the first teacher of wood block printing at the Tokyo School of Fine Arts in 1935. Sosaku Hanga is the modern version of Japanese woodblock printing that unites design, wood-cutting, and printing into the hands of one skilled artist instead of three. What is lost in delicacy is gained in boldness. But beyond that technical aspect, everything else is open to the widest variety of expression. Many Sosaku Hanga artists rose to prominence in the postwar era for their abstract or neo-primitive designs, but Hiratsuka’s work seems more like a simplified version of the nineteenth-century, with a love of landscapes and occasionally young, naked women. And he lived a very long time—allowing him two almost separate lives, with his last thirty years spent with his daughter in Washington D.C., patronized by presidents and making images of national monuments. His strong, cheerful, extensive oeuvre is something of a monument itself—a monument to a life well spent in the catastrophic twentieth century. (Chris Miller)

Art Institute of Chicago, 111 S. Michigan Ave.

“Pothole City! It looks like the streets of Chicago in here!” an Art Institute guard jokes to a co-worker stationed inside Monica Bonvicini’s new Focus exhibition. He’s looking down at the cratered surface of a floor that’s been covered with polystyrene foam and plasterboard and then broken (by the museum’s own staff) in numerous places. Titled “Plastered,” the piece has been reconfigured twenty-three times around the globe since it was first shown in 1999. It sits beneath an enormous hanging light sculpture composed of white fluorescent tubes. Blindingly bright, the lights are too painful to stare at directly for more than a few seconds.

Renzo Piano has described his Modern Wing as “a temple of light…a building about light and lightness.” Bonvicini’s installation offers a deconstructive counterpoint to these celebrated ethereal qualities—theoretically, anyway. Just days after the exhibition opened, and the false floor theatrically pre-broken, visitors attempted to aid its deconstruction by stomping new holes in its surface. The rowdy kids jackhammered with their feet while museum guards looked on nervously, unsure if the “rules” for this particular work of interactive art allowed for such behavior or not. (Note that it’s usually the guards, not the viewing public, who must bear the conceptual burdens of artistic “interventions” like these.) The floor soon boasted quite a few more indentations than before, but the detritus was cleaned up in favor of a more groomed messiness. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

With Konstantin Grcic, it’s all about probjects. That is, the project-based design of an object. In the first major American exhibition of Grcic’s work, the Art Institute brings together a collection of the designer’s chairs, pens, shelving, tables, silverware, serving ware, stools and fixtures. The collection illustrates the energetic output of the German designer, who reinvents his design approach for each project/object (or probject).

Grcic started out as a cabinetmaker. But his curiosity outgrew the narrow design questions posed by cabinets and perhaps it was because he built so many empty ones that Grcic began dreaming up new things to fill them with. He writes, “We can never speak about objects without imagining people using them.” And how else do you use a cabinet except to fill it with things? Read the rest of this entry »

Frank Lloyd Wright, Darwin D. Martin House, “Tree of Life” Window, 1904

RECOMMENDED

It has been over thirty years since the Art Institute devoted a full exhibition to the Arts and Crafts movement, a short-lived but crucial development of Modernism, with resounding echoes in the legacy of twentieth-century Chicago art, architecture and craft. “Apostles of Beauty: Arts and Crafts from Britain to Chicago” showcases English and American treasures from local collections, recalling the movement’s emphasis on sincerity, faithfulness and pleasure. The culmination of the Arts and Crafts movement in America is seen in objects from the Prairie school, a uniquely Midwestern style, which is the main focus of the exhibition.

The exhibition comprises five rooms that explore different aspects of the Arts and Crafts movement, from the exploration of nature as a motif to religion and medievalism in design, with exemplars in the work of Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin, Charles Robert Ashbee, and William Morris. As the journey progresses, one is introduced to additional ideals in the maturation of the movement such as japonisme, the onslaught of photography, Native American themes and burgeoning technological developments.

Hermann Muthesius, an early proponent of the movement, stated that as the values of the movement disappeared, “out of the ashes rose the phoenix of modern art.” Although it was often a domestically bound art form, the exhibition details how Arts and Crafts took the first strides toward full-blown Modernism, acting as an integral comprehensive overview of many of the principles that can be seen a few steps away in the Modern Wing. (Shiloh Aderhold)

Through January 31, 2010 at the Art Institute of Chicago, 111 S. Michigan Ave.