Tucked away in the tiny Brooker Gallery in the northeast corner of the Field Museum is a remarkable exhibit of one of greatest wildlife artists who ever lived, complete with other relics (including maps, guns, dead birds, and movie footage) from the 1926 Abyssinian Expedition. It’s quite a piece of history, including some shots of their local liaison Ras Tafari Mekonnen (who would later become King Haile Selassie). But you’ll know it’s mostly about the art as soon as you see the painting of the regal Bateleur (Phoenicopterus rubber roseus) at the exhibition entrance (or look it up on the internet). Louis Agassiz Fuertes was a great graphic designer—as well as a master of watercolor and respected ornithologist. He’s comparable with Audubon—except that where his great predecessor was showing the wildness of America, Fuertes was showing the wild hearts in each of his feathered subjects. And… each of the 130 works from this expedition were done in just a single day, with materials he picked up in Addis Ababa. After all, his supplies were lost in transit. This exhibit, sponsored by the Terra Foundation for American Art, is showing twenty-eight works—and we can only hope that someday Terra will re-open a museum on Michigan Avenue and show us the rest. (Chris Miller) Through January 4, 2009 at the Field Museum
All Too Real: A Review of “Not All Realisms” at The Smart Museum In the compelling exhibition currently on display at the Smart Museum, photographs tell the story of the sixties in Africa. It was a decade of change, resistance, revolution and hard-won independence in many African countries.
The Friction of History: A Review of Sky Hopinka at the Block Museum Merging metaphor and direct accounts of Fort Marion, Hopinka’s “Cloudless Blue Egress of Summer” offers perspectives on the long and complex reality of American colonialism told through this site of annihilation.
