Crossman Gallery

features a variety of writers who look at art, politics and contemporary culture.

The Susceptible to Images art review website is defunct, but they are
back in blog form. There’s not a regular posting schedule, but if you’d like to check it out, they are located at http://susceptibletoimages.wordpress.com/

Whitewater Arts Alliance publishes winter newsletter.

Download PDF here:
newsletter20winter2020091

Art City at the Journal Sentinel

Urbancode was born in April of 2007 as a pdf-based DC arts magazine. It has since morphed into an interview centered magazine focusing on the best and brightest artists in the DC area and beyond. Urbancode has quickly become one of DC’s favorite arts publications and its design has distinguished itself in the design community.

Published eight times a year, Urbancode interviews the art personalities that make the DC art scene lively, provocative, and visually stimulating.
Urban CodeART Calendar  12/21/2009

ART Calendar  3/17/10

If you find the calendar useful, please feel free to distribute it.

Author : Peter W. Broido, M.D.

By Convention this calendar will use the following abbreviations AIC= Art Institute, SAIC= School of the AI 280 South Columbus ( when other locations are used they will be stated with the address), MCA= Museum of Contemporary Art, MOCP= Museum of Contemporary Photography, CC= Cultural Center, G400= Gallery 400, Ren= Renaissance Society, Smart= Smart Museum, Spertus = Spertus, MAM= Milwaukee Art Museum. Sullivan Gallery 33 S. State 7^th floor

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September 8, – May 2, 2010 Joseph Yoakum: Line and Landscape Smart

In the last decade of his life, self-taught artist Joseph Yoakum (1886–1972) began drawing on Chicago’s South Side. Yoakum produced over 3,000 drawings in this short time, mostly of highly stylized landscapes. He titled each with the names of places from around the globe that he claimed to have visited during his colorful life. Yoakum was less concerned with his works’ physical likeness to the sites he identified as he was with the feelings they evoked—a process he referred to as “spiritual unfoldment.” This exhibition explores the artist and his influence on the Chicago art world by bringing together a selection of compelling works from the Smart Museum’s own collection, including Yoakum’s earlier ballpoint drawings and his more heavily worked watercolors of locations from Puget Sound to Mt. Fuji.

Curator: Jessica Moss, Smart Museum Assistant Curator of Contemporary Art.

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Society for Contemporary Art – Lectures are open to the public but there is a fee to attend them

The following lectures have dates only without a location and are presented to give you an idea of the SOC – perhaps you will want to join

April 1, 2010 Lecture by artist Ryan Gander

April 17 2010 Benefit

May 12, 2010 Annual Acquisition Vote, Annual Meeting

May 20 Sponsor Collection Tour

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INTRODUCING STUDIO CHICAGO

A Year-Long Collaboration Celebrating the Working Artist and Creative Spaces

October 2009 – October 2010

The Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with Columbia College Chicago, UIC – Gallery 400, Hyde Park Art Center, Museum of Contemporary Art, The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and threewalls, announces STUDIO CHICAGO, a year-long collaborative project focusing on artists’ studios.  The project will be introduced at a DCA Artists at Work Forum on Thursday October 29, 2009, in the Millennium Park Room on the 5th floor of the Chicago Cultural Center, 78 E. Washington Street.  The event is free and open to the public.

STUDIO CHICAGO will explore the artists’ studio in terms of creativity; production; and infrastructure at venues across the city.   In exhibitions, talks, publications, tours and research presented throughout the year, as well as the Studio Chicago website, participating organizations and artists will celebrate the working artist and reveal their sites of creative production.  From both historical and contemporary perspectives, topics ranging from the “studio as muse”, “virtual studios” “street as studio” and “gallery as studio” will consider:

■Why is the studio important to art and artists today?

■What is the artist studio today?

■What infrastructures are needed to support art practice and production?

Featured STUDIO CHICAGO programs include:

(More information available at www.studiochicago.org)

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Production Site: The Artist’s Studio Inside-Out

February 6 – May 30, 2010

Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA), 220 E. Chicago Avenue

Hours: Tuesday, 10 am–8 pm (FREE); Wednesday–Sunday, 10 am–5 pm

Production Site reflects and addresses the pivotal role of the studio in artists’ practice while alluding to its enduring status in the popular imagination.  The exhibition reexamines the artist’s studio as subject and reconstructs, documents, and depicts that space with work from local to international artists.  Multi-channel video projections, photographic light-boxes and installations, and life-sized fabrications of artists’ studios — real and imagined – are presented. The exhibition provides the viewer with an unprecedented and illuminating look at how some of the most compelling artists of our time have demystified, remystified, and reconsidered this site. The exhibition is organized by MCA Curator Dominic Molon and accompanied by numerous educational programs.

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Summer Studio

July – Sept. 2010

Sullivan Galleries, SAIC, 33 S. State Street, 7th floor

Hours: Tuesday–Saturday, 11 am–6 pm  ADMISSION FREE

In summer 2010 the Sullivan Galleries of SAIC will be transformed into living studios–bringing together the space of production (the studio) and the space of exhibition and display (galleries).  Participating artists working in a wide range of media, and coming from Chicago and beyond, will open up their creative processes for public view.  This “Summer Studio” will become, too, a site for forums and workshops on artists’ issues and practices.  It will host probing discussions for practitioners and public alike on Chicago as a site of production and the contribution of artists to the local community.  This exhibition is presented by the SAIC Department of Exhibitions and Exhibition Studies and supported in part by the Illinois Arts Council, a state agency.

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threewalls summer thematic residency

July – Sept 2010

Threewalls, 119 N. Peoria Street

threewalls summer thematic residency program will be integrated into the Sullivan Galleries Summer Studio. Curated from an open application by Mary Jane Jacob, Michelle Grabner and Shannon Stratton, four emerging professional artists working across similar concepts and methodologies will be selected to participate and included in additional programming at threewalls, including their annual summer symposium. This once-a-year, two-day event is organized around a chosen theme featuring a panel of local and national visual arts professionals. This year the Symposium will focus on “The Studio,” presenting work by critics, historians and artists that address the questions raised by Studio Chicago.  Press:  Lauren Basing Lauren@three-walls.org

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June 13 2009 – April 4  2010 Elements of Photography MCA

Elements of Photography presents photographic and video works from the MCA Collection with a focus on elemental materials of nature: light and water. Also the fundamental elements of traditional photography, the works included in the exhibition foreground the inherent relationship between the photographic process and the natural world.

With these elements, artists like Hiroshi Sugimoto, Luisa Lambri, Walead Beshty, and Adam Ekberg create ephemeral works that explore the foundation of the photographic image: the play of light through half opened shutters; haunting seascapes reduced to a gradation of elemental material; and luminous circles of light formed by the interplay of sunlight and the camera’s lens. Bringing the natural world to near or complete abstraction, these photographs emphasize their own material composition. At the same time, they invite the viewer to reflect on themes inherent to photographic medium, such as the passage of time and the nature of perception.

The exhibition is organized by MCA Curatorial Assistant Michael Green

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January 2 – March 28, 2010 Queen of Heaven: Photographs by John Allan Faier

Chicago Cultural Center, Michigan Avenue Galleries

Chicago-based photographer John Allan Faier’s large format digital color photographs of mausoleums and their lobbies suggest a paradox.  The lush treatment of the subject contradicts the expected solemnity, creating a sort of cultural taboo.  The formal qualities of the photographs and the architectural spaces represented are evocative and at times provocative in their incongruity with the subject matter.

January 9 – April 4, 2010  R&R (…& R): Works by Susanne Slavick

Chicago Cultural Center, Michigan Avenue Galleries

Pittsburgh-based Susanne Slavick has created a dialogue of “restoration” in her over-painted photographs depicting the destruction in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Lebanon.  By alluding to historical, mythological, and ornamental details in the added painting, she invites us to think differently about the area’s past, present, and future and just possibly begin the healing process.

Fri., Jan. 8, 5:30 p.m.: Gallery Talk with the artist

Fri., Jan. 8, 6-8 p.m.: Opening Reception

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The following are a group of lectures at the MCA – note several of them are free for the Emerge Group – a new group focusing on education and collection. If you are interested in joining or want further information, please contact Bridget Eastman

please note the location of these following  lectures some are at the MCA and others at Gallery 400

Gallery 400: Voices Lecture

Lecture: Andrea Zittel

Studio as testing ground

Monday, April 5, 6 pm

Gallery 400: Voices Lecture

Copresented with Gallery 400, the College of Architecture and the Arts, University of Illinois at Chicago as part of the Voices Lecture Series

Monday, April 5, 6 pm

MCA Theater, $10 general admission, $8 member, $6 students with valid ID.

Internationally renowned artist Andrea Zittel speaks about her work and describes how her studio in the high desert of California serves both as a space for exploration and as a place for crafting and presenting objects, materials, and ideas. Zittel’s sculptures and installations transform everything necessary for life—such as eating, sleeping, bathing, and socializing—into experiments in living.

Gallery 400: Voices Lecture

Renee Green: Studio and Research

Tuesday April 20, 5 pm

Free. Presented by Gallery 400 and the College of Architecture and the Arts, University of Illinois at Chicago as part of the Voices Lecture Series, in partnership with the MCA.

Location: Gallery 400, University of Illinois at Chicago, 400 S. Peoria Street. For more information, contact 312-996-6114.

In this talk, artist, filmmaker and writer Renee Green addresses research as a critical aspect of her work. Through films, essays and writings, installations, digital media, architecture, sound-related works, film series and events Green investigates circuits of relation and exchange over time, the gaps and shifts in what survives in public and private memories, as well as what has been imagined and invented. Green is the Dean of Graduate Programs at the San Francisco Art Institute

Lecture: Kerry James Marshall

The artist in the studio

Saturday, May 22, 3 pm

FREE FOR EMERGE MEMBERS – RSVP directly to Bridget Eastman (this Emerge invitation is non-transferable)

In his latest series of paintings and drawings, renowned artist Kerry James Marshall takes up as his subject the presence of the black artist in his or her studio. Marshall discusses these visually stunning works and invites us to reflect on this question: how do portrayals of famous artists in their studios influence our perceptions of who is an artist?

Made possible by Emerge, a donor affinity group that supports the education, exhibition, and acquisition programs of the MCA.

Bridget Eastman

Coordinator of Individual Giving

Museum of Contemporary Art

220 East Chicago Avenue

Chicago, Illinois  60611

T  312.397.3827

F  312.397.4097

E  BEastman@mcachicago.org

W  www.mcachicago.org

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Other MCA Lectures:

Artspeaks at the MCA

Ilya and Emilia Kabakov in conversation with Matthew Jesse Jackson

Wednesday, May 19, 7:30 pm

Presented by Artspeaks, University of Chicago, in partnership with the MCA

$20 general admission, $15 MCA members and Chicago Presents subscribers, $5 students with valid ID. For tickets, contact the Artspeaks Hotline: 773-702-8080, chicagopresents@uchicago.edu.

For more information, visit http://artspeaks.uchicago.edu/

Ilya Kabakov’s narrative, collaborative, and performative works, developed over thirty years in Moscow at the height of the Cold War, both presaged and influenced the work of many younger artists today. Throughout his career, he has created ambitious multi-disciplinary works that serve as monuments to history and memory, including a wide range of graphic books, paintings, drawings, installations, public projects, stage sets and costumes, theoretical texts, and extensive memoirs. His wife and collaborator Emilia Kabakov and University of Chicago art historian Matthew Jesse Jackson join him in this talk to reflect on past projects and their place within contemporary art. A Russian-American conceptual artist of Jewish origin, Ilya Kabakov was born in Dnipropetrovsk, Ukraine. He left the Soviet Union in 1987 and two years later began collaborating with Emilia. The two now live and work in Long Island.  Jackson is the author of The Experimental Group: Ilya Kabakov, Moscow Conceptualism, Soviet Avant-Gardes, ( University of Chicago Press), 2010. A book signing will follow the talk.

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January 21–May 31, 2010  Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle: Always After (The Glass House) After (The Glass House)

Gallery 186 AI

Overview: Over the past two decades, Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle has gained international recognition for a diverse, conceptually rigorous body of work-both activist-inspired public art and studio-based objects-that consist of formally arresting, often technically complex, poetic meditations on aesthetics, nature, and modernity

His 2006 work Always After (The Glass House) is the fifth installment in a series of film-based works—created between 2000 and 2006—that directly engage the architecture of Mies van der Rohe. The architect serves as a stage from which Manglano-Ovalle conducts a self-reflexive critique of prevailing notions of “failed modernity.” Despite the many broken promises of modernity, the artist has said, “So much has actually come to fruition….We do live in glass houses.” Shot entirely on location at Crown Hall, van der Rohe’s 1950 school of architecture at the IIT campus in Chicago, the film obliquely documents the 2005 ceremonial dedication of the building’s renovation during which the architect’s own grandson broke the windows with a sledgehammer. Manglano-Ovalle captured the entirety of the action and its aftermath on high-speed film, which when played back at normal speed, appears protracted. This combined with scrupulous editing-in which all direct indications of the original event have been removed-and an atmospheric soundtrack strategically intercut with periods of silence, resulted in an exquisitely pared down, nearly abstract image. Panning close-ups show the crystalline shards of broken glass being pushed with a wide broom alongside the well-shod feet of anonymous passers-by. Lacking the specificity of context, viewers are left to interpret the scene for themselves, is this the site of an accident, a terrorist attack, or a routine clean-up of construction debris?

January 23 – March 28, 2010 Angel Otero: New Paintings and Sculpture

Chicago Cultural Center, Sidney R. Yates Gallery

The deeply personal and passionate paintings and sculptures of Angel Otero have made a mark on the cultural scene over the past few years. Otero, having just completed his MFA degree at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago this spring, was one of only four awardees nationwide to receive the prestigious Leonore Annenberg Fellowship in the visual arts this year, which will support his work over a two-year period in New York. This exhibition at the Cultural Center will be Otero’s largest solo show to date; it will bring together some 12-15 new works from the artist’s studio and private collections as evidence of his masterful use of materials, as well as revealing his ideas that stem from growing up in Puerto Rico and training in Chicago.

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January 29 – March 28, 2010 50% Grey: Contemporary Czech Photography Reconsidered  MOCP

This exhibition presents the work of contemporary Czech photographers who investigate themes such as the relationship between time and space in the process of perception and the potential of photography to tell a story and constitute a language of fiction. Participating artists include Stěpán Grygar, Jasanský/Polák, Markéta Othová, Michal Pěchouček, and Jiří Thyn

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January 30 – March 28 Hollis Sigler: Expect the Unexpected Exhibit Hall Yates Gallery CC

Hollis Sigler found her artistic voice in the unrestrained drawings of her youth, but the Chicago artist’s vibrantly colored faux-naïve style draws in viewers only to reveal emotion-laden and very personal content.  Reflecting on passion, fear, romance, escape, desire, suburban entrapment, and dreams of fame, the psychologically complex narratives each reveal the aftermath of a scenario but leave the viewer to solve the mystery of what has occurred.  The exhibition shows more than 60 works dating from 1981 to 2001, including selections from Sigler’s well known series “Breast Cancer Journal: Walking with the Ghost of My Grandmothers,” which documents over 15 years living with the disease that took her life in 2001.  This exhibition was organized by the Rockford Art Museum in collaboration with the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs and was curated by Patty Rhea.  An accompanying catalog is available.

Friday, January 29, 5:30 p.m.: Gallery Talk with James Yood, Adjunct Professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago

Saturday, January 30, 2 p.m.: Slide Lecture by Sue Taylor, Professor of Art History at Portland State University and Corresponding Editor for Art in America from Portland

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January 30, 2010–April 25, 2010 Street Seen: The Psychological Gesture in American Photography MAM

Abstract Expressionism, film noir, Beat poetry, and the New Journalism are all widely recognized aftershocks of World War II, representing a broad aesthetic revolution that championed spontaneity and subjective interpretation as the guiding principles of creative practice. Postwar photographers in many ways set the rhythm and tenor of this new approach, not least because the hand-held camera was naturally suited to chance discoveries and impulsive gestures.

January 30 – May 3, 2010 Christine Tarkowski: Last Things Will Be First and First Things Will Be Last

Chicago Cultural Center, Chicago Rooms

In her largest and most comprehensive exhibition to date, Christine Tarkowski continues to analyze the systems of belief that pervade and shape our lives.  From large-scale cast iron sculptures that examine the ascent and descent of the automobile to modest etchings of satellites in orbit, her recent work highlights rituals performed in a void.  Tarkowski even constructs her own faith-based system for non-existent congregants with a concrete geodesic dome serving as a place of worship and an alt-gospel soundtrack by Jon Langford.

Fri. Jan. 29, 6-8 p.m.: Opening Reception

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January 30, 2010–April 25, 2010  Street Seen: The Psychological Gesture in American Photography, 1940–1959

MAM

Abstract Expressionism, film noir, Beat poetry, and the New Journalism are all widely recognized aftershocks of World War II, representing a broad aesthetic revolution that championed spontaneity and subjective interpretation as the guiding principles of creative practice. Postwar photographers in many ways set the rhythm and tenor of this new approach, not least because the hand-held camera was naturally suited to chance discoveries and impulsive gestures.

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Sullivan Galleries

33 S. State St., 7th floor

Tue–Sat, 11 a.m.–6 p.m.

312.629.6635

Rymer Gallery

280 S. Columbus Dr., 1st floor

Tue–Sat, 11 a.m.–6 p.m.

312.629.6635

Spring Undergraduate Exhibition

Sullivan Galleries, March 27–April 9

Reception: Friday, March 26, 7:00–9:00 p.m.

Nearly 230 talented SAIC students completing undergraduate degrees this Spring exhibit their innovative work. The School of the Art Institute promotes crossing disciplines and challenging received assumptions, with the results of this approach showcased in this exhibition.

ARTBASH 2010:  Contemporary Practices Show

Rymer Gallery, April 17–30

Reception: Friday, April 16, 4:30–8:00 p.m.

ARTBASH 2010 is the culminating event of SAIC’s Contemporary Practices Program.  This exhibition and related events are co-curated by students and faculty, and present a dynamic selection of conceptually and contextually engaged works, all created in courses taught as part of the First Year experience.

Graduate Exhibition

Sullivan Galleries, May 1–21

Reception: Friday, April 30, 8:00–10:00 p.m.

SAIC’s Graduate Exhibition features work by the next generation of artists and designers. More than 120 students completing master’s degrees exhibit their work in art and technology studies; ceramics; fiber and material studies; painting and drawing; performance; photography; printmedia; sculpture; sound; and visual communication design.

The Art of Connection

Rymer Gallery, May 22–June 5

Reception: Friday, May 21, 7:00–9:00 p.m.

The Art of Connection showcases artwork by graduate Art Therapy students and the people they work with at their internship sites. Artwork in the show reflects the varied settings, populations, and practices of art therapy, and represents a culmination of the MA in Art Therapy program at SAIC. For more information about the program, visit www.saic.edu/arttherapy

AIADO Graduate Exhibition

Sullivan Galleries, June 12–July 24

Reception: Tuesday, June 15, 6:00–8:00 p.m.

Showcasing design from the department of Architecture, Interior Architecture, and Designed Objects, this exhibition brings together thesis work by recent AIADO graduate students that explores recent innovations in material, technology, and form.

2700

Rymer Gallery, June 18–July 23

Reception: Thursday, June 17, 4:30–7:00 p.m.

The 2,700-square-foot space of the Rymer Gallery becomes the site for the latest work of SAIC’s students, selected by the Faculty Exhibitions Committee.

Summer Studio

Sullivan Galleries, July–September 2010

In summer 2010 the Sullivan Galleries of SAIC will be transformed into living studios—bringing together the space of production (the studio) and the space of exhibition and display (galleries). Participating artists working in a wide range of media, and coming from Chicago and beyond, will open up their creative processes for public view. Summer Studio will also host probing discussions for practitioners and public alike on Chicago as a site of production and the contribution of artists to the local community. This exhibition is presented by the SAIC Department of Exhibitions and Exhibition Studies and supported in part by the Illinois Arts Council, a state agency. It is also part of Studio Chicago, a yearlong collaborative project that focuses the artist’s studio.

The Student Union Galleries Program (SUGs), founded in the fall of 1994, provides SAIC with a professional student exhibition space that is operated by students. Students are involved in every facet of the gallery’s operation, from administration and program design to the selection of exhibitions, curating, advertising, installation, and deinstallation. For more information, visit www.sugs.info

LG Space

Student Union Galleries (SUGs)

37 S. Wabash Ave., 2nd floor

Tue–Fri, 12:30–5:30 p.m.

Sat., by appointment

312.899.5131

Gallery X

Student Union Galleries (SUGs)

280 S. Columbus Dr., 1st floor

Tue–Fri, 12:30 p.m.–5:30 p.m.

Sat., 10 a.m.–3 p.m.

312.857.7140

Anatomy of a Circle

Gallery X, March 16–April 2

Anatomy of a Circle dissects the circle as means to parallel a spectrum of human relationships. Considered as a body composed of appendages, infrastructures, language, and systems of exchange, the circle becomes a metaphor for communication and experience. Inducing motion and emotion through text, interactive sculpture, and video, this exhibition explores how narrative is embodied in our physical interactions and personal proximities.

Friends in Common

LG Space, March 18–April 2

The advent of Facebook has encouraged voyeurism, exhibitionism, false realities, and constructed personas to become accepted and unquestioned acts. Cole Chickering’s Friends in Common explores our everyday Internet existence, by way of exposing it. Hand-sewn masks and skinsuits, utilized through photography and video, allow for simulated physical contact between the artist and unknowing Internet muses.

The Value of Value

LG Space, April 22–May 14

The Value of Value is a body of work investigating the underlying issues of class, value, and taste that are inescapable and inherent to the creative process. Comprised of prints, drawings and objects created by artists from varying ethnic, geographic and socio-economic backgrounds, the exhibition is an examination into the human condition that promises to excite the subconscious psyche through a physical means.

Tomato Letter

Gallery X, May 4–15

This project is based on the Jiggi Shin’s fascination with the video medium’s sense of liveliness and its capacity for viewer absorption. Shin attempts to achieve such effects through painting, giving life to the images by embedding ambiguous personal stories within them to evoke the viewer’s curiosity.

Off-Site Exhibitions

The work of SAIC faculty, students, and alumni is consistently featured at galleries and art centers across Chicago. These off-site exhibitions showcase some of the work of our innovative artists and designers.

Moholy: An Education of the Senses

Loyola University Museum of Art, 820 N. Michigan Ave.

February 10–May 9

Reception: February 10, 5:30–7:30 p.m.

Hungarian-American artist László Moholy-Nagy introduced Bauhaus ideas to Chicago when he moved to the city in 1937. This exhibition, curated by Carol Ehlers, aims to reignite interest in Moholy-Nagy, to introduce Chicagoans to his multidisciplinary process, and to examine the relevance of modernism’s life-improving message. With exhibition design by SAIC faculty Helen-Maria Nugent and alumnus Jan Tichy, An Education of the Senses is a part of Living Modern Chicago—a citywide celebration of the 90th anniversary of the Bauhaus—and is organized by SAIC in conjunction with the Mies van der Rohe Society at IIT. For more information, please visit www.luc.edu/luma

Recession

South Side Community Art Center, 3831 S. Michigan Ave.

April 2–May 2

Reception: Friday, April 2, 6:00–9:00 p.m.

Recession chronicles the only remaining Works Progress Administration art institution in the U.S., the South Side Community Art Center (SSCAC). To honor this legacy, work will be shown by SAIC alumni and students, each connected to the SSCAC and community in his/her own indelible way. The exhibition will draw upon the parallels between the SSCAC’s existence during the Great Depression and current economic obstacles, while recognizing the art center’s ability to thrive regardless of external conditions. Featuring works by 23 artists, including Margaret Burroughs, Jonathan Green, Archibald Motley, and Charles White.

Roger Brown: Calif. U.S.A.

Hyde Park Art Center, 5020 S. Cornell Avenue

June 20–October 3

Roger Brown was a collector as much as he was an artist. The SAIC alumnus (BFA 1968, MFA 1970) filled his home and studio in La Conchita, California with hundreds of domestic objects—vernacular ceramics, southwestern knickknacks, and pop culture ephemera—all meticulously arranged and occasionally incorporated into his artwork. This exhibition explores Brown’s process of collecting and arranging, which was distilled into his Virtual Still Life series—paintings turned three-dimensional with ceramics on shelves in the foreground. Exhibited together for the first time, these extraordinary paintings and objects reference and echo each other, infusing Brown’s work with reflections on landscape, heritage, religion, history, life, and death. This exhibition is curated by SAIC faculty Nicholas Lowe, using resources from SAIC’s Roger Brown Study Collection

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The Visiting Artists Program at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago Announces Spring Lecture Schedule

Founded in 1868, the Visiting Artists Program (VAP) is one of the oldest public programs of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Formalized in 1951 with the establishment of an endowed fund from Flora Mayer Witkowsky, the Visiting Artists Program hosts public presentations by artists, designers, and scholars in the form of lectures, symposia, performances, and screenings. The primary mission of the Visiting Artists Program is to foster a greater understanding and appreciation of contemporary art through discourse. This Program is supported in part by the Illinois Arts Council, a state agency.

Below you will find upcoming events February through April 2010. Please keep this email as a reference for the semester’s happenings and mark your personal calendar accordingly. All event dates and times are subject to change.

Should you have any questions do not hesitate to contact the Visiting Artists Program office at 312.899-5185 or email events@saic.edu.

April 6, 6pm MATT KEEGAN

SAIC Auditorium, 280 S. Columbus Dr.

Matt Keegan works mainly with photography, collage, printmaking, and sculpture. Recently, he has been thinking about the myriad possibiliites of archives, social history projects, cities, and ways to map and record time. He has had recent solo exhibitions at Altman Siegel Gallery, San Francisco and D’Amelio Terras, New York. He was included in The Generational: Younger Than Jesus group exhibition at the New Museum, New York; Picturing the Studio, at SAIC; and The Reach of Realism at the Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami, FL. He is the co-founder and publisher of North Drive Press. NDP#5, will be released later this year, and is the final issue of this annual art publication.

April 14, 6pm Artist Talk   RYAN TRECARTIN

FREE ADMISSION

SAIC Auditorium, 280 S. Columbus Dr

April 15, 6pm Screening

Gene Siskel Film Center, 164 N. State St.

Admission: $10 general public, $7 students, $5 members, $4 Art Institute of Chicago staff and SAIC faculty, staff, and students. Advance tickets available at GSFC box office or via ticketmaster.

Ryan Trecartin’s video practice both in form and in function advances understandings of post-millennial technology, narrative, and also propels these matters as expressive mediums. His work depicts worlds where consumer culture and interactive systems are amplified to absurd or nihilistic proportions and characters circuitously strive to find agency and meaning in their lives. The combination of assaultive, nearly impenetrable avant-garde logics and equally outlandish, virtuoso uses of color, form, drama, and montage produces a sublime, stream-of-consciousness effect that feels bewilderingly true to life. Trecartin is the recipient of the first Jack Wolgin Prize in the Fine Arts (2009), presented by Temple University’s Tyler School of Art. He has had solo exhbitions at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, OH; Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna, among others. Organized by the Visiting Artists Program and Conversations at the Edge, in this special two-evening presentation, Trecartin will present selections from his newest body of work, Trill-ogy Comp (2009-10): K-Corea INC. K (Section A) , Sibling Topics (Section A), and P .opular S.ky (Section ish). FREE ADMISSION

SAIC Auditorium, 280 S. Columbus Dr

Screening

Thursday, April 15, 6pm

Gene Siskel Film Center, 164 N. State St.

Admission: $10 general public, $7 students, $5 members, $4 Art Institute of Chicago staff and SAIC faculty, staff, and students. Advance tickets available at GSFC box office or via ticketmaster.

Ryan Trecartin’s video practice both in form and in function advances understandings of post-millennial technology, narrative, and also propels these matters as expressive mediums. His work depicts worlds where consumer culture and interactive systems are amplified to absurd or nihilistic proportions and characters circuitously strive to find agency and meaning in their lives. The combination of assaultive, nearly impenetrable avant-garde logics and equally outlandish, virtuoso uses of color, form, drama, and montage produces a sublime, stream-of-consciousness effect that feels bewilderingly true to life. Trecartin is the recipient of the first Jack Wolgin Prize in the Fine Arts (2009), presented by Temple University’s Tyler School of Art. He has had solo exhbitions at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, OH; Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna, among others. Organized by the Visiting Artists Program and Conversations at the Edge, in this special two-evening presentation, Trecartin will present selections from his newest body of work, Trill-ogy Comp (2009-10): K-Corea INC. K (Section A) , Sibling Topics (Section A), and P .opular S.ky (Section ish).

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February 6 – May 30, 2010 Production Site: The Artist’s Studio Inside and Out

MCA

Throughout art history, artists have reflexively looked at the very site where art work is produced — the studio — as a source of inspiration for their work. Production Site reexamines the artist’s studio as subject, presenting work that documents, depicts, reconstructs, or otherwise invokes that space, revealing how the studio functions as a place where research, experimentation, production, and social activity intersect.

The exhibition reflects and addresses the pivotal role of the studio in artists’ practice while alluding to its enduring status in the popular imagination. The works that comprise Production Site include multi-channel video projections, photographic light-boxes and installations, and life-sized fabrications of artists’ studios — real and imagined — that either extol the virtues of the studio or problematize the preconceived and often highly romanticized notions associated with it. The exhibition provides the viewer with an unprecedented and illuminating look at how some of the most compelling artists of our time have demystified, remystified, and reconsidered this site within the physical and conjectured space of the work of art.

The exhibition is accompanied by numerous educational programs. The exhibition is organized by MCA Curator Dominic Molon.

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Feb 6 – May 31  In the Vernacular AI Gallery 1-2

Overview: Vernacular photographs—those countless ordinary or utilitarian pictures made for souvenir postcards, government archives, police case files, pin-up posters, networking Web sites, and the pages of magazines, newspapers, or family albums—have been both the inspiration for and the antithesis of fine-art photography for over a century. In their struggle to gain legitimacy in the art world, fine-art photographers at the turn of the 20th century endeavored to distance their work from the amateur, commonplace, and practical photographs that had become so familiar in everyday experience. In the Vernacular presents the work of artists who chose instead to strategically deploy photography’s quotidian forms as a source of inspiration through the conscious appropriation, reworking, and interrogation of the aesthetics, content, and means of distribution associated with vernacular photography. Photographs by Walker Evans, Andy Warhol, Lee Friedlander, Cindy Sherman, Martin Parr, Nikki S. Lee, and others represented in the Art Institute’s permanent collection challenge us to reevaluate the impact, value, and status of the photographs we encounter in our daily lives. They persuade us to actively consider the ways in which photographs function as significant bearers of complex meaning, rather than mere descriptions or reflections of the world, whether they grace the walls of a museum, the pages of a magazine, the files in a cabinet, or a living-room mantel

April 28, 12:00 p.m., Gallery 100 – Gallery talk, of In the Vernacular

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UBS 12X12 NEW ARTISTS NEW WORKS: ARTIST TALKS

Tuesdays, 6:00 pm  MCA

Local artists featured in our UBS 12 X 12 exhibitions talk about their creative process and answer questions at these informal talks. Join the artists after their talks for 12 X 12: The After Party in Puck’s café..

April 13: Daniel Everett

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TUESDAY CAFÉ PROGRAMS

Doodleganza: The Drawing Extravaganza

First Tuesday of the month, 6-8 pm
A whimsical hands-on art gathering for the untrained and the skilled alike, led by different Chicago-area artists. The MCA provides art supplies and participants bring ideas.

April 6                        Simon Anderson

12×12: The After Party

Second Tuesday of the month on February, March and April

Following the 6 pm 12 X 12 Artist Gallery Talk. The After Party ends at 8 pm

Join us in the MCA café after each month’s 12 X 12 Artist Talk and enjoy music and images selected by the 12 X 12 artist. Cash bar.

April 13: Daniel Everett

Cabinet of Curiosities

Third Tuesday of the month, 6-8 PM, Free

A grab bag of “un-lectures” about a myriad of topics.

April 20                        Bad at Sports

Magical Musical Showcase

Fourth Tuesday of the month, 6-8 pm, Free

Chicago’s most renowned music clubs and organizations present their favorite local musicians in this hour-long set that provides emerging artists with an opportunity to showcase their work.

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CLASSES

Coffee and art

A short art history class. One session, one focus.

Saturdays, 10 am-12 pm

$18 per session; $15 members; $12 students with valid ID.

To sign up, call 312-397-4010, or visit mcachicago.org.

These relaxed, facilitated discussions help you think through the art of our time. Led by experts from Chicago’s art community, each session is limited to 20 participants. No previous knowledge necessary. Sign up for one session or for all.

This program is made possible through the continuing support of the Friends of Edwin A. Bergman Fund.

April 3: on the idea of self as other in Gillian Wearing’s masked exposures,

led by Michael Newman

This program is made possible through the continuing support of the Friends of Edwin A. Bergman Fund.

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Spring Art Sale

April 9, 11 a.m.–7 p.m.

Saturday, April 10, 10 a.m.–5 p.m.

SAIC Ballroom, 112 S. Michigan Ave.

Free

Campus Life and Student Association co-sponsor the Spring Art Sale in the historic SAIC Ballroom. This don’t-miss event is a wonderful opportunity for students to show and sell their work, and for the public to purchase a diverse selection of original paintings, sculptures, photography, prints, jewelry, fashion, and more. Participating students receive 85% of their total sales, and SAIC’s Student Association collects a 15% commission on all works sold to support the Art Sale each year and to fund other projects and educational programs.

An Evening with Robert Downey, Jr.

June 19, 6–10 p.m.

Ritz-Carlton Hotel, 160 E. Pearson St.

Tickets start at $400; tables start at $5,000

Robert Downey, Jr. will accept the Gene Siskel Film Center Renaissance Award at its Annual Benefit. Enjoy cocktails, dinner, tributes, and a conversation with Downey, Jr. For more information, call 312.846.2072.

Common Language Lecture Series

Student organized by the Fiber & Material Studies Graduate Committee, Common Languages investigates the role of materiality in its capacity to expose, dissolve, and reform common languages, histories, and boundaries, asking: If making is a form of knowing, what do we know? This lecture series is made possible by the William Bronson and Grayce Slovet Mitchell Lectureship in Fiber & Material Studies, and includes Doris Salcedo’s lecture on March 15, co-presented with the Visiting Artists Program.

Allyson Mitchell

April 26, 12 p.m.

The Art Institute of Chicago, Price Auditorium, 111 S. Michigan Ave.

Free with museum admission

Deep Lez Sasquatch Pussy Cupcakes, Allyson Mitchell’s on-going aesthetic/political project, advocates a strategic return to the histories of radical and lesbian feminisms. This talk will explore the connections between body politics, lesbian activism, food, craft, and art as explored in Mitchell’s multidimensional work. Mitchell is a maximalist artist who melds feminism and pop culture to play with contemporary ideas about sexuality, autobiography, and the body, largely through reclaimed textile and abandoned craft. Her works have exhibited in the Textile Museum of Canada, Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art, Andy Warhol Museum, and Walker Art Center.

Richard Shiff

April 1, 5 p.m.

The Art Institute of Chicago, Rubloff Auditorium, 111 S. Michigan Ave.

Free

Professor Richard Shiff received his Ph.D. from Yale University, holding the Effie Marie Cain Regents Chair in Art and directing the Center for the Study of Modernism. His scholarly interests range broadly across the field of modern art from the early-19th century to the present, with emphasis on French painting and post-war American and European art. This lecture is presented by SAIC’s Department of Modern Art History, Theory, and Criticism.

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Voices Lecture Series

Stephanie Syjuco: artist
March 30, 5 pm

New Perspectives on Contemporary Latin American Art
April 3, 2 pm
Featuring cultural historian Claire Fox, and art historians Irene Small and Daniel Quiles

Andrea Zittel: artist
April 5, 6 pm
Co-presented with the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, in conjunction with the exhibition Production Site: The Artist’s Studio Inside-Out
Special location: the MCA Theater, 220 East Chicago Avenue
General admission $10, MCA members $8, students with valid ID $6

Talking Cure: Topic TBD
April 13, 2010

Renée Green: artist and writer
April 20, 2010

All Voices lectures, except where noted, are presented in the Gallery 400 Lecture Room, 400 South Peoria Street, and are admission free

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February 27–May 23, 2010 William Eggleston Democratic Camera, Photographs and Video 1961-2008 AI Galleries 182–184, 188

Overview: One of the most influential American photographers of our time, William Eggleston has defined the history of color photography. This exhibition is the artist’s first retrospective in the United States and presents a comprehensive selection from nearly 50 years of image making. It brings together Eggleston’s famous and lesser-known works, particularly his black-and-white images from the late 1950s and 1960s, which helped shape his color photography. Also showcased will be Eggleston’s provocative video recording of 1970s Memphis nightlife, Stranded in Canton, which influenced his later work. Internationally acclaimed, Eggleston has spent the past four decades making photographs that convey intuitive responses to fleeting configurations of cultural signs and moods as specific expressions of local color. Psychologically complex and casually refined, bordering on kitsch and never conventionally beautiful, these photographs speak principally to the expanse of Eggleston’s imagination and have had a pervasive influence on all aspects of visual culture

Organizer: This exhibition is organized by the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, in association with Haus der Kunst, Munich.

Sponsor: Generous support is provided by The Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation, Inc., Norman and Melissa Selby, The John and Annamaria Phillips Foundation, Marcia Dunn and Jonathan Sobel, Diane and Tom Tuft, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Additional support is provided by the Stephen C. and Katherine D. Sherrill Foundation, Lauren and Louis DePalo, the William Talbott Hillman Foundation, and The Gage Fund.

May 11, 12:00 p.m., Griffin Court – Gallery talk William Eggleston: Democratic Camera, Photographs and Video, 1961–2008 by Katherine Bussard

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February 28 to April 11, 2010  Matt Saunders Ren

For his exhibition at The Renaissance Society—the artist’s first solo museum show—Berlin-based artist Matt Saunders will present several interrelated new works in diverse media.  In drawings, paintings, short films, and photographic works, Saunders recasts images, often taken from film or television, into new narratives about portraiture and spectatorship. At the same time, he pushes boundaries between media to tell a parallel story of how images are made, are repeated and are embodied in materials. Saunders’ subject matter is a diverse cast of characters, including an early Los Alamos scientist, a largely forgotten East German actress, a silent film star, and the highest paid British television actor of the 60’s.   As a group, these characters span World War II and the Cold War, providing a kind of stuttering record of 20th Century lives. It is an exhibition about painting, and also about moving pictures, how they are found, loved, and lost.

Related Events:

Sunday, March 28, 2:00 pm

Christine Mehring Gallery Walk-through

Associate Professor of Art History and the College

University of Chicago

Christine Mehring will lead a gallery walk-through.  Her areas of interest include postwar Western Europe, German art, relations between new and traditional media.

Her recent publications include Art of a Miracle: Towards a History of German Pop, 1955-1972, in Art of Two Germanys, Cold War Cultures, (exhibition catalogue, Los Angeles: LACMA, 2009). FREE

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March 13 – September 5,   Rewind: Selected Works from the MCA Collection, 1970s to 1990s

During its forty-year history, the MCA has distinguished itself with groundbreaking exhibitions that have contributed substantially to the evolving history of contemporary art. These exhibitions have, in turn, stimulated the museum and its supporters to acquire important and often numerous pieces by these artists. A resulting hallmark of the MCA’s collection is the presence of significant, in-depth bodies of work by artists. By displaying several examples of an artist’s work, visitors can gain a better understanding of their working process and development of ideas over the span of several years.

Artists in Depth presents concentrations of work by artists whom the MCA has collected in depth, or whose pieces in the collection are definitive examples of their singular aesthetic. Showcasing key artists of the last forty years whose work has been and continues to be defining to international contemporary art underscores the MCA’s role as a leader in and incubator of artistic innovation.

Artists in Depth: The 1970s to 1990s focuses on works from these particular decades to show how the groundbreaking work from the recent past is only now becoming historicized for its critical take on art institutions, identity politics, and new approaches to photography in the late-20th century. It includes works by Claes Oldenburg, Richard Artschwager, and Sol LeWitt — who emerged in the 1960s but have continued to make work today and whose influences can be seen in artists of a younger generation — as well as Alfredo Jaar, Lorna Simpson, Richard Long, Tony Tasset, Richard Prince, Sharon Lockhart, and Matthew Barney. This exhibition is organized by Julie Rodrigues Widholm, Pamela Alper Associate Curator.

April 6 and May 11

Julie Rodrigues Widholm  on Rewind: Selected Works from the MCA Collection, 1970s to 1990s

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April 3 , 12-12:45 p.m.            Price Auditorium            AI   Free with admission

Artists Connect Series  Ian Weaver Connects with Kerry James Marshall

This monthly lecture series connects local, contemporary art with the vast collection of the Art Institute. Chicago-based artists discuss the work they’re creating today while connecting with the work of artists of the past

April 3 –    June 27, 2010    John Fjortoft: Photographs

Chicago Cultural Center

Michigan Avenue Galleries

April 9 – June 20, 2010 Sarah Pickering: Incident Control MOCP

The Museum of Contemporary Photography is proud to present a monographic exhibition featuring the work of British artist Sarah Pickering. While appearing to exist between reality and illusion, Pickering’s images are actually documents of simulation. The exhibition will present a total of 36 photographs from four recent series of Pickering’s work, spanning from 2002 to the present: Explosions, Fire Scene, Incident, and Public Order.

April 9 – May 23 GEISSLER/SANN: THE REAL ESTATE MOCP

The photographic series the real estate (2008/2009), by Chicago-based artists Beate
Geissler and Oliver Sann, documents homes in foreclosure, evoking the absence and loss of former homeowners with unembellished portraits of empty living space.

April 10 – July 3, 2010  Arte Papel Oaxaca & Kiff Slemmons

Chicago Cultural Center

Michigan Avenue Galleries

April 17-June 27  Romare Bearden : From Process to Print – Graphic Works Yates Gallery CC

April 24- July 3 Diane Simpson Sculpture+ Drawings 1978-2009 Exhibit Hall CC

April 29 6:00- 7:30 Fullerton Hall AI

Modernism Again—Some Videos by Anri Sala

500 Ways of Looking at Modern

Michael Fried, Johns Hopkins University, shows and analyzes several works by the young video artist Anri Sala.

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April  30 – May 3 Art Chicago

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May 20 6-7 PM Fullerton Hall AI

Lygia Clark—A Laboratory for the End of Art500 Ways of Looking at Modern Rethinking Modernism series

Luis Perez-Oramas, Museum of Modern Art, explores techniques and meanings in the art of  Brazilian artist Lygia Clark, noting existential and metaphysical dimensions, and connecting her to the harbingers of the end of art.

June 26, 2010 – October 10, 2010 Alexander Calder and Contemporary Art: Form, Balance, Joy MCA

The MCA’s holdings of Alexander Calder are in-depth and span all important phases of this American artist’s career. And while a well-known, even beloved figure, Calder has not previously been considered an influential figure for contemporary artists. Yet in the past few decades, more and more young American and international figures are taking cues from Calder, whose hands-on explorations of form, balance, color, and movement make him instantly recognizable. These artists return to explorations of structure and balance, in many cases, handcrafting their materials into expressive artworks that celebrate the visual over the intellectual experience.

In the words of artist Jason Middlebrook: “In studying this artist to learn how to fashion my work, Wood From All Over The World Mobile, (2008), I became very fascinated by Calder. Calder seems such a generous artist to me, an artist totally into beauty, which really appeals to me.” This exhibition is the first to explore Calder’s significance for the new generation of artists emerging in the mid-1990s and early 21st century.

A major presentation of Calder works drawn from the MCA’s extensive holdings and Chicago area and national public and private collections is to be mounted along with new works by seven sculptors who have been directly influenced by Calder: Martin Boyce, Nathan Carter, Abraham Cruzvillegas, Aaron Curry, Kristi Lippire, Jason Meadows, and Jason Middlebrook. Curated by MCA Curator Lynne Warren, it is accompanied by a fully-illustrated catalogue and is expected to tour nationally.

July 2 –– September 26, 2010 JOHN BALDESSARI: A PRINT RETROSPECTIVE FROM THE COLLECTIONS OF JORDAN D. SCHNITZER AND HIS FAMILY FOUNDATION MOCP

The MoCP is proud to present a retrospective of John Baldessari’s prints, spanning the four decades of Baldessari’s post-painting period, 1970s to the present. This collection of prints is on loan from the Portland, Oregon-based collection of Jordan D. Schnitzer.

July 17 – September 15, 2010 Jazz Loft: W. Eugene Smith, NYC , 1957-1965

Chicago Cultural Center, Sidney R. Yates Gallery

In the late 1950s, famous photo-documentarian W. Eugene Smith lived and worked in a NYC loft building with an amazing list of inhabitants – famous jazz musicians, filmmakers, writers and artists.  In photographs and audio recordings, he documented an era and rare views of people such as Thelonious Monk, Zoot Simms, Norman Mailer, Diane Arbus, and Salvador Dali, presented here in photographs, work prints, videos, and audio listening stations.  The exhibition is organized by the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University, the Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona and the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University.

July 24–October 3, 2010  Henri Cartier-Bresson: The Modern Century AI

Overview: Henri Cartier-Bresson (1908–2004) is one of the most original, accomplished, and influential figures in the history of photography. His celebrated work of the early 1930s helped to define the artistic potential of modern photography; a decade later, after surviving three years as a prisoner of war, Cartier-Bresson emerged from World War II determined to document a world in the midst of profound change. He did so in 1947 when he joined Robert Capa and others to found the Magnum photo agency, an organization that allowed photojournalists to reach broad audiences through such publications as Life and Paris Match, while still retaining independence and control over their work.

This exhibition of more than 300 images is the first full retrospective devoted to Cartier-Bresson in three decades. It includes both his formally groundbreaking early images and his historically significant postwar work—in India and Indonesia during struggles for independence, in China during the revolution, in the Soviet Union following Stalin’s death—that redefined the field of photojournalism.

Following an exquisite presentation of the best of the early work, the exhibition is organized as a series of distinct sections. Several of these sections are devoted to his work in countries such as the United States, the Soviet Union, and France. Other sections present the themes that preoccupied Cartier-Bresson throughout his career: portraiture, the persistence of ancient customs and patterns of life, the transformation of these patterns by modern industry and commerce, the poetry of human encounters on the street, and the psychology of the crowd.

The retrospective, organized by the Museum of Modern Art, shows the rich interplay between Cartier-Bresson the artist, gifted at capturing the flux of life, and Cartier-Bresson the photojournalist whose lens shaped our understanding of seismic political and cultural changes across the second half of the 20th century. This retrospective is the first to draw upon the extraordinary resources and cooperation of the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson in Paris. It will premiere at the Museum of Modern Art in February 2010 and after its Chicago showing, travels to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

Catalogue: The retrospective will be accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue that includes a critical essay by exhibition curator Peter Galassi, chief curator of photography at the Museum of Modern Art, and an extensive chronology of Cartier-Bresson’s travels and publications.

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October 2, 2010 – January 9, 2011 Luc Tuymans MCA

Luc Tuymans (Belgian, b. 1958) is considered one of the most significant European painters of his generation and he has been an enduring influence on younger and emerging artists. Born and raised in Antwerp, where he lives and works, Tuymans is an inheritor to the vast tradition of Northern European painting. At the same time, as a child of the 1950s, his relationship to the medium is understandably influenced by photography, television, and cinema.

Interested in the lingering effects of World War II on the lives of Europeans, Tuymans explores issues of history and memory, as well as the relationship between photography and painting, using a muted palette to create canvases that are simultaneously withholding and disarmingly stark. Drawing on imagery from photography, television, and film, his distinctive compositions make ingenious use of cropping, close-ups, framing, and Luc Tuymans sequencing, offering fresh perspectives on the medium of painting, as well as larger cultural issues.

The artist’s more recent work approaches the post-colonial situation in the Congo and the dramatic turn of world events after 9/11. These series have led Tuymans to a sustained investigation of the realms of the pathological and the conspiratorial.

Luc Tuymans is co-organized by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and Wexner Center for the Arts. It is organized in chronological order, highlighting the fluid progression of the artist’s work and spanning every phase of the artist’s career. It features approximately 80 key paintings from 1985 to the present and is accompanied by a comprehensive, fully illustrated catalogue.

October 22, 2010–January 16, 2011 focus: Richard Hawkins Galleries 182–184 AI

Overview: Since the early 1990s, American artist Richard Hawkins has become internationally recognized for an emphatically diverse practice—including artist’s books, collage, painting, and sculpture—that resists easy classification. His work is as intensely engaged with the histories of art and literature, from ancient Greece to the 19th-century French Decadent movement, as it is with former teen pop idols Matt Dillon, “Marky Mark” Wahlberg, and Guns N’ Roses guitarist, Slash. Hawkins is equally well versed in the writings of Robert de Montesquiou and Marcel Proust and the painting of Gustave Moreau, Francis Bacon, Cy Twombly, and Gerhard Richter as he is with the intricacies of the video game Tomb Raider and the Thai sex trade.

The exhibition focus: Richard Hawkins will be the artist’s first solo exhibition in an American museum and will consist of approximately 100 objects, including books, collages, drawings, paintings, and sculptures spanning his 20-year career. Installed in the Abbott Galleries of the Art Institute’s new Modern Wing, focus: Richard Hawkins will highlight several major bodies of work with particular consideration of the collage medium as the central mode of the artist’s practice. Included will be a series of artist’s books dating from the early 1990s; rubber mask and magazine clipping assemblages (exhibited together for the first time since their creation in 1991); several early collage series from 1993 and 1995; recent Greek, Roman and Shinjuku collages; Inkjet prints from the iconic 1997 Disembodied Zombie series; several Celestial Telegraph paintings; a grouping of “dollhouse” sculptures; and ceramic figures.

Catalogue: In addition to the free gallery brochure, accompanying the exhibition will be a full-color, 144-page hardcover catalogue with essays by George Baker, associate professor of modern and contemporary art, University of California, Los Angeles; Lisa Dorin, exhibition curator, and Ali Subotnick, curator at the Hammer Museum, as well as a selected biography and bibliography. The catalogue will be distributed by Yale University Press.

Other Venues: focus: Richard Hawkins will travel to the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles in the spring of 2011.

Jan 29  2011– May 8 Jim Nutt: Coming into Character  MCA

Since 1990, Jim Nutt has focused exclusively on female heads, in spare line drawings and rich, detailed paintings. This exhibition is a retrospective of Jim Nutt’s work that emphasizes the development of these important paintings through their precedents in his own work. Acknowledging the groundswell in interest in this unique American artist’s work, this will be the first major presentation of Nutt in over a decade. Nutt’s history as an important artist dates to the mid-1960s where in Chicago he was a chief instigator of the irreverent “Hairy Who” group, now better known as the Imagists.

While it was undoubtedly inspired as much by the popular culture of the mid-twentieth century, especially comic books, advertisements, juke-box and pinball machine art, and street signs, Nutt’s art also explored the formal devices and techniques of historical painting. Northern European portraiture of the 15th and 16th century; Colonial American painting; the color and line explorations of Henri Matisse and Joan Miro; the quirky individualism of such artists as John Graham, Max Ernst, Arshile Gorky, and H.C. Westermann all offered lessons as Nutt has matured over four decades of artistic development. This exhibition is organized by MCA Curator Lynne Warren.

Summer 2011 Mark Bradford: : You’re Nobody (Til Somebody Kills You) MCA

This exhibition is the first survey of the artist’s work to date. Spanning the years 1996 to 2010, it examines Bradford’s work in all media, beginning with early sculptural projects, and culminating in a number of new commissions. Deeply influenced by his experience growing up in South Central Los Angeles, the titles of his works often allude to stereotypes and the dynamics of class, race, and gender-based economies that structure urban society in the United States, specifically those of Los Angeles where he lives and works.

An anthropologist of his own environment, Bradford describes himself as a “modern-day flaneur,” saying, “I like to walk through the city and find details and then abstract them and make them my own. I’m not speaking for a community or trying to make a sociopolitical point. At the end it’s my mapping. My subjectivity.” The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue with an essay by the curator, an interview with the artist, and three commissioned essays by specialists in the field. The exhibition is organized by the Wexner Center for the Arts.

Why the Art Proposal Went Haywire
by Bruce Murphy
bruce.murphy@milwaukeemagazine.com
Tuesday 4/7/2009

MURPHY’S LAW LETTERS
milwaukeemagazine.com

You have to hand it to city of Milwaukee bureaucrats. They managed to take the most benign work of art – something with no sex or nudity, abstract or difficult images – and turn it into a huge, overblown controversy that erupted last week. A few aldermen reacted with confusion and outrage to the playful artwork proposed for Wisconsin Avenue, and arts defenders then heaped abuse on the officials, with one bozo, former gallery owner Mike Brenner, threatening to defecate on the lawns of the aldermen. What a black comedy.

In the meantime, no one has bothered to fully explain how and why this artwork was created – and why we should care if it gets killed. Milwaukee Journal Sentinel art critic Mary Louise Schumacher has breathlessly kept up http://www.jsonline.com/blogs/entertainment/42440652.html with every blogger and windbag with an opinion on the subject (at times like this, the explosion of Internet “journalism” begins to resemble the spread of kudzu), but hasn’t done the reporting people need to understand the issue.

The genesis of this work of art goes back to the late 1990s, when the city of Milwaukee created a Downtown master plan that was intended to beautify the area and make it more exciting. The city then applied for and won some $24 million in Federal Highway Administration money allocated to reduce automobile congestion and encourage pedestrian traffic, which in turn was funded through the state Department of Transportation. The grant is an 80/20 match, meaning the feds pay 80 percent and the city pays just 20 percent for a plan that would help draw people – both locals and tourists – Downtown. For decades, the Federal Highway Administration has helped fund such projects, which have often included an art component.

The city hired Skidmore, Owings and Merrill LLP to do a “Pedestrian Corridor Study,” completed in 2002, which recommended various streetscaping: fencing, shrubbery, textured crosswalks, decorative lighting, even better-looking trash receptacles. One of the first areas to get this redo was Wisconsin Avenue from Second to Fourth streets. Skidmore also proposed that public art could add to this pedestrian-friendly ambience.

To that end, the city hired Regina Flanagan, who has decades of experience in the field, having previously run Wisconsin’s and then Minnesota’s Percent for Art programs. Flanagan did a study of where public art could best be incorporated into the streetscaping and then helped lead a committee of nine others. It included art experts like David Gordon (former head of the Milwaukee Art Museum) and Curtis Carter (former head of Marquette University’s Haggerty Museum of Art), several representatives of downtown business groups (like Beth Nichols, who runs the Downtown Business Improvement District) and members of the city Department of Public Works and state Department of Transportation. The committee chose the location for a demonstration art project (Wisconsin Avenue, from the river to Prospect Avenue) and then did the equivalent of a public bidding process: Artists from across the country could apply for the job of creating the art work.

The committee reviewed all the applications, chose three finalists, and brought them in for interviews. Their unanimous choice was Janet Zweig, a Milwaukee-born artist who grew up in Chicago and now lives in Brooklyn, and has extensive experience creating public art in numerous cities. “The committee was very enthusiastic,” says Flanagan. “They liked her work; it was playful and pedestrian-oriented. They also felt she’d be easy to work with.”

Zweig chose the easternmost block of Wisconsin Avenue, which leads to the di Suvero sculpture and the art museum’s Calatrava addition, a work so successful it has become the logo for Visit Milwaukee. She wanted to reinforce the streetscaping on that block. “I love Milwaukee and that part of Wisconsin Avenue. I think it’s a charming place,” Zweig says.

Her concept was to install eye-level kiosks on street lamp posts that would present little animated plays. Triggered by a motion detector, the plays would start as pedestrians approached. “It’s meant to be a piece about walking in Milwaukee, and the experience of the artwork changes as you walk down the street,” Zweig says. “The little tiny people (in the animated plays) are mirroring the people walking down the street. It’s meant to encourage pedestrian activity and discussion.”

The playlets are created using the old flip sign technology once used by railroads. “It’s a beloved technology,” she says. “It you use the latest technology, it quickly becomes dated.” By contrast, she felt, this would reinvent the old flip sign technology into something timeless and charming.

Zweig wanted to use Milwaukee writers and filmmakers to help create the animated plays. There would be 15 plays – three rotating on each of five kiosks. Zweig would operate as the director of this. The plays would have to be interesting enough (“powerful and poetic” she says) to not get stale with repetition. But the technology would also allow for periodic replacement of the plays with new ones, perhaps on an annual basis.

Each of the 15 short plays would require 80 flip signs split in two, or 2,400 images, all of which would have to be designed and silk-screened. The entire work would cost $300,000, of which the federal government would pay $240,000, which would include about $30,000 for Milwaukee company AFX Sign Effectz to fabricate the flip sign containers, and another $30,000-$35,000 to pay the local filmmakers and writers.

The Common Council had already approved the city funding for the streetscaping, which was to include an art project. But the standard procedure, says Bob Bryson of DPW, is to get approval for each stage of the streetscaping. Normally, of course, it’s a rubber stamp process. Common Council members aren’t going to give thumbs up or down on shrubbery and fences. But (gulp) art?

Long experience in many cities (including Milwaukee, where the Blue Shirt artwork was killed) has proven that elected officials (who, after all, must defend their decision to constituents) need some context for viewing art. Flanagan is a veteran of such meetings, but her contract had expired, and Bryson and DPW hadn’t gotten around to securing a federal grant to extend it. Zweig herself could have done a beautiful job of explaining the work. But Bryson, whose expertise is city lighting, unaccountably decided he would brief the Common Council’s Public Works Committee.

Zweig asked Bryson to appear before the committee, but he told her that wouldn’t be necessary, she says. Bad mistake. The aldermen cut Bryson off before he had a chance to fully explain the project. They might have been a little more polite to Zweig.

“It would have been better to have the artist there,” Bryson now concedes. “I don’t know much about art. In hindsight, there’s a lot of stuff I would do differently.”

Zweig says she has high-res images of the proposed work she could have presented. “In a way,” she says, “I don’t blame the aldermen. They were taken by surprise and in a way they couldn’t interpret.”

Their comments seemed foolish and soon met with the contempt of the dreaded arts lovers, who shall brook no objection to art. That, in turn, provoked the wrath of the arts haters, who shall suffer not one dollar taxed for art. “There’s a group of people on both sides who want to enflame this, who have escalated the hostility,” says Flanagan.

As the Calatrava addition proved, people in this city can embrace art. It is, however, much harder to do this based on a mock-up of the work with an out-of-context description of it. 

I don’t know if this is a great work of art, but I think it’s a smart idea that would be fun for pedestrians and catnip for tourists. It would complement the streetscaping of the city’s decade-old Downtown project, add to the ambience of that block of Wisconsin Avenue, and reinforce the new, post-Calatrava image of Milwaukee. The city’s entire contribution of $60,000 would go to local workers – both industrial and artistic.

Killing the artwork would waste all the federal money that has gone to the artist so far (and Zweig could sue to demand the city’s portion of it), and waste all the time put in by volunteers from the arts and business community, who have worked to improve Downtown. Coming after the Blue Shirt’s death, it would make it all the more unlikely that any major art project could be created in Milwaukee.

On the other hand, we don’t really “need” this art. The city and the citizenry can get by perfectly well without it. So why spend a cent on it?

Of course, we also don’t need the new shrubbery, fencing and decorative lighting that’s been added to Wisconsin Avenue. We don’t need the stone lions of Lake Park, the canopy of city-maintained trees on countless city streets or the new night lights at the Mitchell Park Domes. We didn’t need to spend more to create the enhanced design for the Sixth Street Viaduct, the glorious arch of the Hoan Bridge, or the newly retro City Hall clock. Across the city we have added countless examples of completely unneeded improvements that have added mystery and beauty to our lives. Perhaps Zweig’s artistry can be just as powerfully unnecessary.

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