CHICAGO — In case you haven’t been keeping up with the school closing crisis in Chicago or the continuing escalation of gun violence, the experience of youth in the hella screwed-up public education system just became even more brutal. The Chicago Board of Education is now defending the classroom ban of Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis in 7th through 10th grade classrooms, satisfying its desire to dictate and restrict how the book is read and taught.
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CHICAGO — Typical American movie moments of heightened tension use signal sounds in tandem with the emotions portrayed by the actors on screen. The family dog knocks over a precious antique plate, and an ominous tune rolls in to signify that the pup is about to get in trouble. Dad arrives home only to catch his adolescent daughter in the act — a sharp, shrill note strikes just as he opens the door to her bedroom. In the world of Guy Ben-Ner’s “Soundtrack” (2013), the opposite types of moments occur, representing a shift in the notions of a family “drama.”
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CHICAGO — Cartoonist Rube Goldberg (1883–1970) was best known for his depictions of “inventions” that imagined complicated contraptions with far too many moving parts built to solve the simplest of problems. These “Rube Goldberg machines” appeared in his work, and were used as devices to poke fun at the roundabout nature of American bureaucratic and political systems in the post-World War II era. Rube Goldberg’s Ghost, a large group exhibition on view at Columbia College’s small Glass Curtain Gallery (through May 4) features work by more than 20 artists who may very well be Goldberg’s companions in that they, too, enjoy laborious machinations with political undertones.
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CHICAGO — The absence of the body (politic), the presence of a re-negotiated domesticity and a necessary embracing of the fine line between romance and criticality play forward roles in artist Latham Zearfoss’s work, which embodies radical feminism of days past while looking toward the future. Zearfoss’s new work, which is part of the group exhibition How Do I Look? at Roots & Culture Gallery in Chicago, explores the re-envisioning of a queer aesthetic that delicately tiptoes its way into the gallery space, presenting itself in a quiet way like a cat nestled on a window sill basking in the afternoon sunlight.
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CHICAGO — The 2014 Whitney Biennial won’t be like every biennial before it. The always anticipated art world event will partly be a response to the Occupy movement’s call to end the Whitney Biennial, which charged that the major exhibition was just another art world commercial interest, and it will also be a swan song to the Whitney’s longtime home in the Marcel Breuer building, but many people may not realize that the event will also be different as it will welcome a Chicago curatorial approach into the mix, and that’s very exciting.
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CHICAGO — Johannesburg-based South African artist Sabelo Mlangeni’s photographs depict a celebratory, positive, and campy-funny queer life in the countryside.
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CHICAGO — MDW is not an art fair focused on sales and bringing in big-name collectors. In fact, it’s quite the opposite.
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CHICAGO — When my wife was completing her mail-in voter ballot for the upcoming US elections, something on the instruction leaflet caught my eye.
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CHICAGO, Illinois — Walking down an urban Chicago street on a quiet Sunday afternoon, I noticed a gathering of greenery nestled in the crack of a sidewalk jutting up against a cement wall. These small moments of nature poking through the urban landscape reveal themselves when we are not paying attention to anything particular, but rather reveling in what is alive around us. It is in these moments that Chicago-based artist Jenny Kendler’s work situates itself, wrapping around the mind like a vine crawling up the exterior of a 100-year-old brick building.
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CHICAGO — The excitement and buzz around Expo Chicago, the Windy City’s resurgence into the international art world, felt deafening. Practically every artist in the city who knew how to handle art was in some way involved with the fair. Newcity newspaper, the city’s #1 alt-weekly, published “Chicago top 50 artists,” a timely and simultaneously ballsy list explaining the who’s who of Chicago.
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