Barbara Kruger. “Untitled (Brain),” 2007. Private collection, Delaware. Courtesy of Art Finance Partners, LLC. Photo courtesy Mary Boone Gallery, New York
In this career-spanning exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago, pioneering artist Barbara Kruger remixes and remakes her work in an ambitious, nonlinear presentation. Kruger’s work has long critiqued the consumerist individualism of late capitalism, often using text and appropriating the techniques of advertising. For this exhibition, the conceptual artist is also creating works that will span the city: on billboards, the CTA and for Art on the Mart.
For the fortieth anniversary of the MacArthur Fellows Program, the Smart Museum of Art has organized a multi-site exhibition to explore the idea of the commons, or the resources held in common by everyone in a society. Twenty-nine artists, including locals Kerry James Marshall, Dawoud Bey and LaToya Ruby Frazier, use the opportunity to question whose rights of access are afforded to in our political moment. For the full site map and more details, visit towardcommoncause.org.
For the Hyde Park Art Center’s two-story gallery, Chicago artist Lan Tuazon creates a visual representation of human consumption in the form of a one-bedroom house made entirely of packaged goods and common household items. Made to represent the average person’s lifetime consumption, the sculpture is a test site for a house of the future, where, in a circular economy, our waste can be sustainably reused. The culmination of a decade-long project, the SAIC professor hopes the work will remind viewers of the myriad possible futures available to us, if only we can imagine them.
