Galleries & Museums, Chicago Reader

The house Theaster Gates built

Aimee Levitt — Fri, 10 May 2013 16:00:00 -0500

Theaster Gates's 12 Ballads for Huguenot House goes on display at the Museum of Contemporary Art. by Aimee Levitt Theaster Gates is known as an artist, but he trained as an urban planner, and it's hard to separate his work from the city that inspired it. So his new show at the Museum of Contemporary Art presented a bit of a challenge to both Gates and the curators.…

"In Metamorphosis" and outside of time

Sarah Nardi — Mon, 06 May 2013 17:30:00 -0500

"In Metamorphosis," featuring the work of Vivian van Blerk and Douglas Stapleton, looks at archetypes over time. by Sarah Nardi It's always interesting to see two artists working independently of one another exhibited together. Done right, the juxtaposition can both enhance the viewer's understanding of each artist as an individual and allow for the creation of new meaning in the interplay between their work.…

Sanford Biggers manifests a new destiny with Ago

Jeff Huebner — Fri, 26 Apr 2013 15:00:00 -0500

With Ago, artist Sanford Biggers manifests a new destiny. by Jeff Huebner Sanford Biggers's window installation Ago has a formal decorativeness that belies its provocative intentions. It combines a number of mediums (fabric, spray paint, wood, light boxes) and cultural references (quilt making, graffiti, Japanese woodblock prints, landscape painting) to put a twist on manifest destiny and America's coded—and not-so-coded—racial histories.…

One photographer's story of ordinary American lives

Lloyd DeGrane — Thu, 25 Apr 2013 04:00:00 -0500

Lloyd DeGrane's "Domestic Issues" finds beauty in the mundane. by Lloyd DeGrane This photo project is my story about how people live their ordinary lives in America. There are times when I enter someone’s home and think, Finally I've found the most mundane activity imaginable, because that's what I've always looked for.…

The world according to Vaginal Davis

Sam Worley — Mon, 22 Apr 2013 15:30:00 -0500

Queercore luminary and "terrorist drag" proponent Vaginal Davis speaks at the Art Institute. by Sam Worley No man but a blockhead ever wrote except to get laid, Samuel Johnson said—or something like it, I'm pretty sure. Similarly, when the genderqueer performance artist Vaginal Davis started showing her art publicly, in 1980s Los Angeles, it was for reasons lesser than glory, as she explained last year in an interview: "I know!…

Ghosts of memory in the paintings of McArthur Binion

Claudine Isé — Thu, 18 Apr 2013 04:00:00 -0500

Paintings in "Ghost: Rhythms," from early in McArthur Binion's career, look like the work of an older man. by Claudine Isé Memory lives in our bodies as well as our minds—something to consider when you look at McArthur Binion's solo show "Ghost: Rhythms" at Kavi Gupta. The paintings were made in New York in the 1970s, when the artist was in his 30s, but what's on view here feels like the work of a much older man.…

Return of the Armory Show: Artistic murder! Pictorial arson! Total degeneracy!

Aimee Levitt — Mon, 01 Apr 2013 08:30:00 -0500

Chicagoans were up in arms about the Armory Show: DePaul Art Museum looks back. by Aimee Levitt The International Exhibit of Modern Art, better known as the Armory Show, arrived in Chicago on March 24, 1913, and for the next 23 days—as long as the exhibit remained open—Chicagoans were obsessed. Nearly 200,000 people passed through seven cramped galleries on the Art Institute of Chicago's second floor to look at the first major exhibition of modernist work in America.…

At Chicago Artists' Coalition, the penis mightier than the sword

Sam Worley — Tue, 26 Mar 2013 14:30:00 -0500

Jennifer Mills explores the idiot joke in "101 One-liners; Falling Flat." by Sam Worley In "101 One-liners; Falling Flat," Jennifer Mills wonders if the limits of humor can't be adjusted just a little lower. What about an art show that both examines and enacts an exceedingly dumb premise?…

"Rising Up": Hale Woodruff's murals on a northern tour

Janet Potter — Fri, 15 Mar 2013 17:30:00 -0500

"Rising Up": Muralist Hale Woodruff’s scenes of black history take a northern tour. by Janet Potter In 1938, Talladega College commissioned the Harlem Renaissance artist Hale Aspacio Woodruff to paint six murals to hang in a campus library. Three tell the story of the slave ship Amistad: an onboard mutiny, the trial of the captives, and their eventual return to Africa.…

In "Destroy the Picture," a violent attack on the canvas

Sam Worley — Tue, 26 Feb 2013 18:00:00 -0600

A new Museum of Contemporary Art exhibit collects abstract artists' impassioned responses to World War II. by Sam Worley The title of a new exhibit at the Museum of Contemporary Art presents a spin on the old question about the artist's proper response to war: What does it look like to paint a void? You could reconceptualize the loss created by World War II, for instance, as an act of creation—the war didn't just coincide with the birth of the nuclear age but served as midwife to it.…