Robert Burnier Appearing in panels and exhibitions across the country, rising gallery darling Robert Burnier is a prominent figure among the small coterie of Black abstract artists in Chicago. His folded sculptures show the beauty and complexity of simplicity. The origami-like pieces at first look like multicolored folded construction paper. The acrylic-painted aluminum sculptures are thoughtfully assembled, each individual fold and crease is a deliberate stylistic choice by the artist. With multiple exhibitions both national and international in the coming year, he’ll continue to explore the possibilities of abstract art. (Jen Torwudzo-Stroh)
Alex Chitty/Photo: Joseph A. Mietus
Alex Chitty “Bunch of Pussies,” a series of mobile-sculptures with curlicue black tails and triangle-eyed feline faces, was on view for Alex Chitty’s 2020 exhibition “Becoming the Breeze: Alex Chitty with Alexander Calder” at the MCA. For the show, curtailed by the pandemic, Chitty worked with curators Jack Schneider and Raven Falquez Munsell to mine everything from Calder artworks to conditions of ownership in challenging received institutional hierarchy. Incredulity is integral to Chitty’s practice, invested in the irreducibility of experience, ineffability of beauty, and innumerable ways of knowing—including “the wisdom of weight, texture and temperature,” Chitty says. From steel pierced with brass buds to golden cherry pits stuck between tigerwood slats, Chitty’s disobedient things have been shown in recent exhibitions at Patron, the Hyde Park Art Center, Tiger Strikes Asteroid, the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, GAVLAK, and the McCormick House at the Elmhurst Art Museum. The artist is currently a writer-in-residence at Writing Space in Chicago and advises graduate students at the School of the Art Institute. (Emeline Boehringer)
Mike Cloud Mike Cloud’s paintings are steeped in symbolism and political themes, but viewing them with the assumption they are solely political paintings in the traditional sense would be not to understand them fully. Through masterfully layering his work not only literally with the use of paint, text, textile materials and often abstract or stellate-patterned wooden-structured canvases, but also figuratively by layering symbols (the Star of David is often employed) and motifs, Cloud’s paintings are politically charged but also have an element of personal truth in relation to politics. His “paintings aestheticize their subjects and function on social and political terms that go beyond the stakes of authentic expression.” Cloud moves beyond a surface-level exploration of power structures often found in political work by turning the exploration inward and investigating themes of death and personal failure. The associate professor in Northwestern University’s Department of Art, Theory, Practice continues to solidify his place as one of Chicago’s most significant contemporary painters. (Regan Dockery)
Bethany Collins/Photo: Joseph A. Mietus
Bethany Collins In her striking text-based works, artist Bethany Collins shows that the words on paper aren’t necessarily the most important part of storytelling. In her artworks, the multidisciplinary artist explores how race and language interact by manipulating words and history to pull out what’s missing, the people whose stories have not been told. Collins creates her pieces by stretching and contorting different texts until they take on new meanings. By deconstructing text in everything from newspapers, government reports, history books and story books to encyclopedias and dictionaries, she dives in beyond the written word, and into the subtext. What’s left after her edits, torn, bleached, dyed, scratched, smudged remnants have meaning beyond the simple definition of the words. She challenges the viewer to interpret stories without reading. In her collaborations with composers, she demonstrates that across artistic mediums, the established narrative is only ever part of the story. She’s paving a way for herself as well as the people that history left behind. (Jen Torwudzo-Stroh)
Brendan Fernandes/Photo: Joseph A. Mietus
Brendan Fernandes “When I was a young ballet dancer, we all had to dance—we all had to breathe—at the same time. We all looked like the same body. I think there’s real power in moving together as one, there’s power in awareness and in supporting each other. And that is something we need more of in this world,” says Brendan Fernandes. He describes his work as building critical mass and thinking about solidarity, and he looks at dance as a political material that is also a form of protest. Engagement and active participation play an integral role in his work, which delves deeply into the concept of the body as both a cultural vessel and a means of expression. As dance, installation, video and sculpture come together to probe cultural displacement, queer identities and collective agency. Says Fernandes, “It’s about responsibility—it’s about a nurture and a care that together we can build and that will make us a better community.” (Vasia Rigou)
Floating Museum members Jeremiah Hulsebos-Spofford, avery r. young, Andrew Schachman and Faheem Majeed. Photographed at the Floating Museum studio/Photo: Joseph A. Mietus
Floating Museum Working at the intersections of art, community, architecture and public institutions, avery r. young, Andrew Schachman, Faheem Majeed and Jeremiah Hulsebos-Spofford—together they make Floating Museum—are a super-diverse team that pays attention to the infrastructure, history and aesthetics of a space and its untapped potential to make change happen. Thinking out of the box and out of the museum (literally), the collective makes sure that art is out “in the wild” for all to see, feel and experience. Their upcoming mission: the curation of CAB 5, the fifth edition of the Chicago Architecture Biennial titled “This is a Rehearsal.” (Vasia Rigou)
Judith Geichman/Photo: Joseph A. Mietus
Judith Geichman This summer, Judith Geichman blanketed the stone floor at the Dora Maar house in Ménerbes, France where she worked as a 2023 Brown Foundation Fellow, with plastic and flooded paint across some usual surfaces: linen, Yupo and Korean Hanji paper. Also a 2023 recipient of the Grants to Artists award from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Geichman works between chance and purpose in “mark-making events” that build up a pulsing record of impulse and instinct. Her instruments: flat Hake brushes, sponges, rakes, squeegees and drywall scrapers, to name a few. Over a forty-five-year painting practice, Geichman’s hypnotizing work has been acquired by the MCA, the Illinois State Museum, and the Rockford Art Museum. Recent solo exhibitions underline her mainstay status in Chicago: at the University Club and Regards, both in Chicago and at Frieze New York. Geichman is a professor, adjunct at the School of the Art Institute and will mount a solo exhibition with Regards in 2024. (Emeline Boehringer)
Matthew Goulish and Lin Hixson/Photo: Joseph A. Mietus
Matthew Goulish and Lin Hixson With “Every house has a door,” Lin Hixson and Matthew Goulish explore project-specific works that include intercultural collaborations. The duo uses a rotating group of twelve to fifteen Chicago-based artists, of varying ages, diverse backgrounds and skills. Hixson and Goulish are devoted to reassessing historically or critically neglected subjects. In collaboration with Finnish artist Essi Kausalainen, they have been working on a performance response to “Carnival of the Animals,” the 1886 musical suite by Camille Saint-Säens. Unlike the original, their work will focus on endangered and extinct species. It will be performed at Links Hall in Chicago in late October. In May 2024, they will premiere “Crystal Pantomime” at The Arts Club in conjunction with their exhibition on the work of the painter and writer Mina Loy, who wrote the prose ballet. Hixson and Goulish teach at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and are visiting faculty at Stanford University. (Nicole NeSmith)
Max Guy/Photo: Joseph A. Mietus
Max Guy Max Guy’s fresh and economical exhibition at the Renaissance Society this year interleaved Chicago with the land of Oz. Muddling the boundary between the real city and the fictional one, Guy figured Oz as a place more-than-real, an idea proper to the public domain hyperuranion: a realm of pure, perfect ideas intelligible only through shadows cast on our sphere below. Guy’s practice interrogates world-building, from the collective effervescence of fan cultures to collage and cut-and-paste transposition of figures and silhouettes from one plane to another. Exhibitions at Jack Shainman and Nicola Vassell Gallery, Gallery 400, Prairie, Produce Model, University of Illinois Springfield, the Krannert Art Museum, Each Modern, and the Museum of Contemporary Art have showcased the artist’s growing practice. With upcoming shows at Chicago’s Good Weather, And Now Gallery in Dallas, and Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, it’s Max Guy’s Cinematic Universe, and we’re just living in it. (Emeline Boehringer)
John Henderson John Henderson creates textured and atmospheric paintings. He frequently employs casting techniques, and works through this process of duplication, to craft paintings that possess a reflexive quality, all while maintaining a connection to the past. This connection can be traced back to their original casts, the process of their creation, and the influence of Abstract Expressionism and Minimalism that he works out from. His recent exhibition alongside B. Ingrid Olson at Soccer Club Club Chicago has just concluded. His next show—a solo exhibit titled “Two Sculptures, Three Paintings, and One Photograph”—is set to open on September 2 at Perrotin Paris. (Ryan Fazio)
