Gordon Matta-Clark, Tina Girouard and Suzanne Harris

By Jason Foumberg

Jessamyn Fiore never met Gordon Matta-Clark, but he has always been part of her life. “I grew up in a loft that my mother and Gordon had converted from a factory building,” in downtown New York City, says Fiore. “We had his art around. His family was like my family. His friends were like my friends.” Matta-Clark died in 1978, and two years later Fiore was born to his widow, Jane Crawford. “Once Gordon passed away, my mother devoted her life to his work and his legacy,” says Fiore.

Although Matta-Clark was just thirty-five when cancer ended his life and his prolific art career, the art world wasn’t ready to sweep him into the dustbin of art history. And we still haven’t—no doubt due, in part, to the hard work of caring for his estate, a tremendous task that Crawford and Fiore now share, as of last year.

As co-director of the estate, Fiore, thirty-two, has not simply inherited the wealth of an important artist; Fiore has what she calls a “creative relationship” with Matta-Clark’s legacy, as if he were her art-father, his ideals about art and community fostering her own belief system.

Fiore’s story is fascinating because it reveals how an artist’s reputation is sustained, in our modern curriculum and imagination. It is not simply that a powerful dealer releases major artworks into the market at strategic moments; the legacy of an artist like Matta-Clark stays alive because an advocate like Fiore works to connect the core values of his artwork with those that are relevant to today’s artists. Fiore identifies a spirit of collaborative artistic empowerment in the work of Matta-Clark and his peers that resonates with today’s artist-centric art world.

“What is the role that friendships play within an artistic community, and within an artist’s practice?” asks Fiore. She has expanded her inquiry beyond Matta-Clark to look at 112 Greene Street, a live-and-work art center in a converted factory building, known by its street address, that incubated New York City’s political, post-minimal, feminist, performance and experimental art in the seventies. Read the rest of this entry »

By Jason Foumberg

It’s an exciting moment for sculpture in Chicago. I’ve tracked a few patterns in contemporary object-making through these nine current exhibitions.

Jun Kaneko at Millennium Park
The newest addition of public art to Millennium Park (for seven months) are dozens of large glazed ceramic sculptures by Jun Kaneko, a Japanese-born, Omaha-based artist who should be familiar to Chicagoans (he’s shown here seventeen times in the past thirty years, but not since 2003.) All of the ceramic sculptures are graphically painted (polka dots, mummy tape) in bright colors. On the Randolph Street side are standing figures, tall and fat as taxidermied bears, but with pig faces and Looney Tunes eyes. There’s a hoard of them, and they’re a little freaky (one has blue nipples). On the Monroe Street side are tablet-shaped objects, the size of tombs, similarly painted. I almost scorned these sculptures—they verge on Cows on Parade kitsch—until I read the artist’s description. The figures are Tanuki, or mythical Japanese trickster characters with jazzy skin and desperate smiles. They’re pleasurably sinister, and a little more non-denominational than the Buddha heads spouting all over Chicago, by Indira Johnson.
Through November 3 at Millennium Park. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

Ceramic art ain’t what it used to be. On a small table near the gallery entrance, six historic pots huddle together to remind us of the past. Though made by ancient hands from all over the planet (Rwanda, Peru, Cambodia and North America, among others), they all share a certain dignity. Rooted to the shelf beneath them, each stands tall and proud, asserting a simple though necessary function, and as strong, content, healthy, reliable, honest and handsome as one might wish sons and daughters to be. But don’t those qualities lead to a dead-end, low-pay job in today’s world? Ambition, cleverness, innovation, rule-breaking and unique virtuosity are required for success in our civilization, and are well represented by the five contemporary artists chosen to fill the rest of the gallery. Read the rest of this entry »

cover art by Carol Jackson

By Jason Foumberg

Imagine this issue of Newcity shaped as a shoebox, like the one stashed in the back of your closet. Every now and then it feels good to finger your way through that time capsule of polished milestones and broken tokens of who you once were and still might be today. More than just a junk drawer, your stash is bound by a secret thread, as strong and fragile as a spider’s web, which only you can spin. Will your offspring be creeped out by your crypt of former selves, or will they dust off and ponder each artifact?

If Chicago’s art scene had a souvenir box it would be as large as a landfill, and just as mixed. What if you plunged an arm into that warm biomass and pulled up some treasures and obsessions and regrets, at random, from art scenes past? What would they look like, jammed in your fist? Could you spread those dried things on a table and divine their significance, drawing lines between them, and to yourself?

I asked dozens of Chicago-based artists and their enthusiasts to shine a flashlight into their personal-history storehouses and retrieve contributions for this fanzine. Part collage, part salad, the combined curiosities peaceably mingle here as if at an art opening. There are several natural affinities and also a few unexpected pairings. In sum, they form a time capsule of a community that is constantly changing. Here are mementos from long-closed shows. Here are faces kept in time. Here are odds and ends we’re still trying to sort. Here we are today, holding on for tomorrow. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

Throughout Egypt, domestic structures are traditionally constructed of brick, stone or adobe, typically between two and five stories in height with projecting oriel windows. Referred to as Mashrabiya, the street-facing bay windows are commonly enclosed in an ornamental screen of wooden latticework. The primary function of a Mashrabiya screen is privacy—the dense crisscrossed pattern preventing any vantage point from the exterior. A number of displaced Mashrabiya screens can be found in Susan Hefuna’s current exhibition, meticulously assembled by the German-Egyptian artist and painted with black ink. However, the latticework of Hefuna’s Mashrabiya screens is not merely ornamental, as messages such as “WOMAN CAIRO” and “CONFESSION” appear within the wooden pattern as the viewer recedes from the structures. Legible only when viewed from a distance, the words position their reader just outside of the private space the Mashrabiya would presumably enclose. Read the rest of this entry »

Andre Butzer

RECOMMENDED

Andre Butzer asserts that his recent paintings are “similar to everything I did before” and the audience “should react and be irritated by it.” But they don’t seem all that irritating to me. The annoying, cartoony stupid-faces—did they owe more to Walt Disney or Edvard Munch?—have disappeared from the work, and what’s left is buoyant calligraphy of thick paint in primary colors. There’s a carnal energy that occasionally erupts into fleshy tones and shapes, lending the effect of an uninhibited child cavorting with rubber duckies in the bathtub. Yet this happy kid is also a deft painter and there’s an enjoyable precision and measured balance about his designs. In a nod to the contemporary collector’s need to be puzzled, Butzer also offers a gray painting with two black rectangles. By itself, it’s a cipher, but it does serve well to cleanse the palette between his more boisterous entrées. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

Huma Bhabha’s sculptures and collages at Rhona Hoffman Gallery seem like untimely ruins of contemporary culture. Although best known for her sculptures, it is Bhabha’s collages on display here that chiefly create this sense of dislocation between past and present. The foundations of Bhabha’s collages are photographs of abandoned construction projects in the desert landscape of the artist’s hometown of Karachi, Pakistan. The landscapes in Bhabha’s photographs appear stretched and twisted, an effect attenuated by streaks of ink lapping over the images. Bhabha’s collages are grungy and frenetic. The conflict between man-made development and nature is vividly rendered: the sun-drenched landscapes are awash in hot pink and neon orange better suited to billboards than pastoral scenes. The spontaneity and density of Bhabha’s collages speak to the upheaval of the landscape depicted in the underlying photographs. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

In her new exhibition, “Rewinds,” at Rhona Hoffman Gallery, Anne Wilson showcases an artistic practice rooted in hands-on processes of making, forming and creating. Wilson reintroduces a visual vocabulary relying on depictions of sewing tools and ephemera to advocate for the contemporary relevance of craft-based production in material culture. Rather than rely on a kitsch or homespun style, she communicates through starkly beautiful minimalist forms and surfaces that have almost clinical suggestions. Although previously known as a textile artist, Wilson explores a new medium for this show, glass, that when molten can be similarly woven, shaped and spun.

Half of the space in the gallery’s main room is occupied by Wilson’s eponymous “Rewinds” sculpture, a series of horizontal glass panels forming a raised sterile surface. Wilson littered the long minimal expanse with handcrafted glass forms that reference small sewing bobbins, specifically rewinds, which are spindles wound with leftover thread. Implying an interrupted or paused action, these static remnants of labor are clustered seemingly sporadically, forming a type of topographic assemblage that could be a sewer’s careless workspace. Kneeling pads positioned at both ends encourage onlookers to become participants in this space and its suggested fabrication work. Read the rest of this entry »

Chromatic Patterns for Chicago

RECOMMENDED

Walking into the heat and light generated by Judy Ledgerwood’s “Chromatic Patterns for Chicago” from the cold, bleak street in January is one of the best parts of her exhibition at Rhona Hoffman Gallery. Ledgerwood deftly appropriates Color Field abstraction’s scale and subsequent power to activate space and affect viewers by drenching Hoffman’s front room in prismatic vibrations. Two large paintings applied directly to opposite walls of the gallery (one wraps around the corner) transform the cold cube into a temporary souk. Fully saturated hot pink, manganese, royal blue, silver and copper is applied in wide horizontal bands, which curve slightly to reference the drape of textiles, while also emphasizing the flatness of paint on plaster with an overlaid simple pattern of flowers and crossed lines. There is a generative tension between the spontaneous, not-taking-itself-too-seriously quality of her hand-drawn patterns and the very carefully worked out interactions of color that belie their apparent insouciance. Read the rest of this entry »

Kehinde Wiley has had twenty-six solo shows in museums and galleries since 2003, and his work is in the permanent collections of sixteen American art museums, including those in Milwaukee, Brooklyn, Denver, Minneapolis and Detroit. Obviously there has been a strong upscale market, both critical and commercial, in the opening years of the twenty-first century for dandified depictions of healthy young men of color, beginning with African-American, and now expanding into sensitive young dudes from Asia. And yet, art critics still continue to discuss whether Wiley can actually paint. Like Louis Comfort Tiffany, he seems to be less an artist and more a manufacturer of high-end luxury goods, with workshops in New York and China, and twenty assistants employed to paint around his digitally manipulated source material.

As Roberta Smith in the New York Times wrote in 2008, his earlier paintings “usually felt dead and mechanical, despite having been painstakingly handmade; their compositions were often fussy and unstable,” while in his more recent work “he is beginning to paint skin in ways you can’t stop looking at….the compositions are consistently calmer, and the spatial play between the figures and their backgrounds is more tightly controlled.” David Greenberg, in Art in America, judged that “Wiley is most successful when depicting in oil the vibrant contemporary street wear of his models with a painstaking skill that borders on the fetishistic.” And perhaps, compared with what passes as figure painting in summer art fairs, these judgments are reasonable. Read the rest of this entry »