RECOMMENDED

Founded by former slaves in 1867, Talladega College, in Alabama, commissioned six murals for their new library in 1939. Three panels tell the story of Africans aboard the slave ship Amistad, their successful revolt and legal aftermath. The other three panels commemorate the Underground Railroad, the founding of the college, and the building of the library in which the murals were installed. It’s an epic that begins with violence and ends with constructive cooperation toward higher education. The artist was Hale Woodruff (1900-1980), professor of art at a historically black college in Atlanta. He had attended art schools in Indianapolis, Chicago, Cambridge and Paris, and spent a summer in Mexico with Diego Rivera. Read the rest of this entry »

photo by Soohyun Kim

The brass rods shudder as the wind sweeps through the prairie. Steel grasshoppers click in the tall grass. A small mole cricket snaps its wings. And rain falls metallic on black soil.

In the sound installation “Prairie,” currently on exhibit in the Yates Gallery at the Chicago Cultural Center, artist Shawn Decker composes an abstract symphony of microcontrollers, computers, motors and recycled cellphone speakers. Subtle algorithms echo the dynamic movement and rhythm of the Illinois grasslands.

Decker grew up at the end of a dirt road in Western Pennsylvania. He remembers canoeing down the Susquehanna River, camping in the hills of the Allegheny Plateau, and watching the flutter of cardinals and blue jays in the trees outside his window. His artistic practice involves making meticulous tape and phonograph recordings in order to deconstruct rhythmic and spatial patterns of sound. He says, “The algorithms I compose are derived from natural processes. I often use configurations of Brownian motion of particles or fluctuations of 1/f noise to translate and reimagine the sound of leaves falling on the ground or raindrops hitting a blade of grass.” Read the rest of this entry »

Applied to a contemporary art exhibition, the saying about a tree falling in a forest might go something like this: If an artwork’s political or ideological import isn’t palpable in the work itself, does it have any repercussions? If the viewer can’t sense it, is it really there at all? Such questions have become increasingly important as artists who engage global capitalism and its discontents make the ethical dimensions and political ramifications of artistic production integral to their work, as do Shelly Jyoti and Laura Kina.

Jyoti a textile artist, and Kina, primarily a painter, tackle identity politics and post-colonialism through their respective mediums. They teamed up for “Indigo,” a collaborative exhibition of work featuring that particular murky shade of blue, named for the natural dye from which it’s derived. As the exhibition text explains, indigo has a rich, layered cultural and socioeconomic history. For Jyoti, the color signifies the struggles of Indian indigo farmers oppressed by British rule back in the nineteenth century. Her “Indigo Narratives” series adapts ancient embroidery and printing techniques in wall textiles and one giant, cascading mobile to contemporary images that symbolize India’s struggle under colonialism and subsequent non-violent rebellion. Kina’s “Devon Avenue Sampler Series” a “sampler” of both needlework and appropriation, combines textiles from Indian and Jewish traditions with text and commercial iconography native to Devon Avenue, a street that Chicago magazine once called “the most beguiling commercial strip in the city” due to its dizzying array of ethnically diverse restaurants and shops. While “Indigo” is billed as a collaboration between two professional artists, the gallery didactics acknowledge other hands at work—much of the material labor that went into the art on display was performed by Indian artisans belonging to a fair-trade women’s collective. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

Watching Paige Cunningham and Anna Kunz’s performance, “One Careless Gesture Away From Destruction,” was like getting a six-course dinner when you’re expecting just an entrée. It was a feast of varied cultural forms that held together as a kind of conversation about creative production.

There were essentially three distinct shows on view: a sculptural tableau with a video component, situated right in the middle of Industry of the Ordinary’s (IOTO) retrospective exhibition; a vogue-ballet mash-up choreographed by Cunningham; and a voguing presentation and workshop, led by the Chicago chapter of the House of Ninja, a local queer dance collective, or “house,” in the parlance of the voguing community. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

“Planting and Maintaining a Perennial Garden III,” Faheem Majeed’s contribution to the Industry of the Ordinary’s collaborative exhibition, uncovers a significant artifact of Chicago art history. Majeed presents a striking but deteriorating mural by Bill Walker from the 1960s, titled “Hate and Confrontation,” and contributes a set of bleachers made from repurposed cedar boards from which to survey the work.

Bill Walker worked from the 1960s until the eighties and has murals all over the South Side. Many have been destroyed but several have been restored. Walker was an ordinary man who worked in the post office yet did what we might call extraordinary things. He founded the Organization for Black American Culture and participated in the founding of the Chicago Public Art Group. The wall-sized graphic mural depicts a series of receding black profiles lit by the harsh light of anger, recalling representational work by Charles White, Elizabeth Catlett and Margaret Burroughs. It is a stirring, authentic expression of an African-American artist’s direct, untheorized engagement with the turmoil of race relations in Chicago, a fragment of social and overlooked aesthetic history, which does not seem at all ordinary. Read the rest of this entry »

By Jason Foumberg

“That’s what I would call the cheapening of celebrity,” said Catherine Walsh, SVP of global marketing at Coty perfumery, on the hurried release of B-list celebrity perfumes this shopping season, in the New York Times. The artist duo Industry of the Ordinary would likely agree, but might extend the condemnation across the board, to all celebrity products. “Celebrity and the Peculiar” is their room-sized artwork that offers samples of celebrity fetish fragrances in smell tents. By luck, “Celebrity and the Peculiar” is on view concurrently with “The Art of Scent, 1889-2012″ at the Museum of Arts and Design in Manhattan.

Certainly there’s something in the air. But what? I poked my nose in the celebrity smell tents to find out. Here are my reviews of the scents in “Celebrity and the Peculiar.” Read the rest of this entry »

Self-Portrait, 1961. From “Vivian Maier: Out of the Shadows”/Jeffrey Goldstein Collection

By Brian Hieggelke

She was the North Shore nanny who went viral shortly after her death. A once-in-a-generation “overnight” success story with all the elements of fairy tale: an unknown genius who made art for art’s sake, a lost “treasure” found when her repossessed storage lockers were bought at auction by photography collectors, a world that can’t seem to get enough of a Vivian Maier that it knows so little about.

It’s hard to believe it’s been only two years since her story exploded on the local, national and international scene, when the Chicago Cultural Center mounted an exhibition of her work and the accidental but priceless collection of John Maloof became a central part of the narrative.

But with all the attention over how her work was discovered and brought to light, little was known about Maier herself, other than the recollections filtered through a few of her onetime wards. I went to the launch party for Richard Cahan and Michael Williams’ new book about the photographer, “Vivian Maier: Out of the Shadows” last month and, like the rest of the standing-room-only crowd, was captivated by their description of the challenges they faced in reconstructing the life story of someone who spoke volumes in images, but was virtually silent in words. We recently had an email conversation to discuss the singular phenomenon that is Vivian Maier. Read the rest of this entry »

By Alicia Eler

In the Midwestern land of milk and honey stands a 600-pound cow made of butter. “Delicious” isn’t the best word to describe the manufactured butter beast, but it is a spectacle that keeps visitors returning to the annual Iowa State Fair year after year. A sculptor is chosen each year to meticulously carve hundreds of pounds of dairy fat into the shape of a cow. This has been recurring since 1911, for more than 100 years, making it one of those bizarre, tried ‘n’ true American traditions.

President Barack Obama will soon join the ranks of mammals crafted into buttery monuments—not for the Iowa State Fair but for the city of Chicago. On October 26, as part of the Industry of the Ordinary’s mid-career survey “Sic Transit Gloria Mundi: Industry of the Ordinary” at the Chicago Cultural Center, artists Mathew Wilson and Adam Brooks will wheel a life-sized butter sculpture of the president from Grant Park Packing at 842 West Lake Street to the Chicago Cultural Center. They call this piece “The Harvest” because, as Wilson explains in his quiet English accent, they are quite literally harvesting the responses or opinions of passersby who observe the parade. It is both spectacle and American tradition wrapped into one stick. Typical of IOTO’s populist, conceptual art approach—which actively engages audiences whether or not they have fancy art school degrees—the butter Obama will take its refrigerated place at the Cultural Center less than two weeks before the 2012 presidential election on November 6, 2012. Read the rest of this entry »

Artwork and Photo by Matthew Hoffman (HeyItsMatthew.com )
Matthew is a 2006 Newcity Breakout Artist

“A friend recently confessed to me that he secretly ranks the participants in Chicago’s art world according to their importance,” wrote artist Molly Zuckerman-Hartung in this publication. Molly’s friend doesn’t work at Newcity; although we annually rank half-a-hundred scenesters of the stage and page, this is our first line-up of visual artists. But everyone intimately knows Molly’s secret friend—the shuffler of the big rolodex, the line cutter, who maybe crept through a Deb Sokolow conspiracy, who buys all your friends’ artworks but never yours. Guess who? It’s you. You made this list and you ranked it and you live in it. You’re either on this list or you’re a product of this list or you’re on this list’s parallel universe (maybe, the Top Fifty People Who Read Lists list). Congrats!

We agree that a linear fifty names is simplistic. Instead, picture this list as a family tree that’s been trimmed into an MC Escher hedge maze. Or see the names as intersecting circles, a cosmic Venn diagram, or raindrops hitting a lake. There could be a list of fifty (or 500) best painters, or a new list for every week we publish this newspaper. For now, here are fifty people who have made an impression on other peoples’ lives.

Who are these people? They are mentors, magnets, peers, alchemists, art mothers, Chicago-ish, artists’ artists, evangelicals, alive today, polarizing, underrated, retired, workhorses and teachers. Lots of teachers. If you’re an artist in Chicago it’s likely that a handful of these artists trained you, or showed you that art was even a possibility. The bonus of local legends is that we can learn from them, face to face. Many lead by example.

About the selection process: Artists only for this list. (Power curators and other hangers-on get their own list, next year). To rank these artists we surveyed hundreds of local living artists, racked our brains, had conversations, wrote emails, canvassed the streets with art critics, cast votes, then recalls, called important curators in London who promptly hung up on us, drank pumpkin latte, checked emails and then finally wrote it all down. And now, we present to you, the Art 50. (Jason Foumberg)

The Art 50 was written by AJ Aronstein, Janina Ciezadlo, Stephanie Cristello, Alicia Eler, Pat Elifritz, Jason Foumberg, Amelia Ishmael, Anastasia Karpova, Harrison Smith, Bert Stabler, Pedro Velez, Katie Waddell and Monica Westin. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

Chicago’s very own global princess of pop photography, Patty Carroll, once gained her renown from her color shots of our sweet home’s hotdog stands, elevating them to the rank of Louis Sullivan’s or Frank Lloyd Wright’s landmarks. Now she has served up color “portraits” of “female forms” swathed and smothered in all manner of fabrics, from clothing to draperies and tapestries to blankets, so that we can’t imagine what the flesh inside the culture might look like if, indeed, there is any.  There is a feminist agenda here about how women have been reduced to anonymity by the oppressive social roles enforced by patriarchal society, but fortunately the political preaching is undercut by Carroll’s exuberant imagination, which guarantees that each of her images is so radically individualized and seductive that they collectively end up reeking of beauty power with a bit of tongue in the chic. Read the rest of this entry »