Visual Art Culture of Chicago and Beyond
I’ve been looking at this painting since I moved here to study art and philosophy more than thirty years ago. I felt an intimate connection from the moment I first saw it, perhaps because of the painting’s implicit reflection of my own plight as a young artist.
Though a work might begin in a moment of tragedy, the distance it gives us from it, can lead to joy.
July highlights
The works on view serve to memorialize the many lives lost, allowing space and resources to mourn those individuals, and to process both the dark histories of the United States as well as the bold acts of resistance. Hopefully the exhibition moves visitors beyond rage or grief or empathy into action.
Though the aesthetics of each artists’ work are contradictory, they are united by their undeniable feat of endurance.
In Chavis’ work, Black queerness cannot be contained to neat and orderly portraits.
Ailes and Lopez’s installations, images and sculptures function as a cosmos of life—worlds where the viewer is placed in a disordered exercise of cognitive sense-making between rather than sense-making of.
As the kitchen appliance referenced in the exhibition title signals, these artists seem to share an interest in—and perhaps anxiety about—domestic spaces and the rituals that occur there.
“Composed Under Compression” feels like playful, gleeful, and quick-witted recovery theater.
Pacheco makes abstracted sculptural work and masterful functional objects, experimenting with both soda and wood kilns.
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