Art Review
Artists’ Monuments to the Great Migration
Histories need to be unearthed, recorded, studied, intersected, sung, paraded, and learned, and two Chicago shows do that for the Great Migration.
Chicago Cultural Center
Art
A Cry of Rage by Ukrainian Women Artists
In Women at War, art is a counterattack, a means by which a victimized populace fights back.
Art
The Black Girlhood Altar Implores Us to Remember
Lighthearted at some points, soul-crushingly poignant at others, the exhibition, organized by A Long Walk Home, embodies the wistful nostalgia of time past.
Art
Art by Survivors of America’s Wars
The 2023 Veteran Art Triennial & Summit proves that the tools of the colonizer, the occupier, and the oppressor can be used to resist and persist.
Art
Historical Revisionism Gets Mischievous in Chicago
Two solo shows in Chicago are must-sees for anyone who cares about feminism and how it intersects with modernist architecture, urban planning, and design.
Art
The Afterlives of Art Scraps
Artists Selina Trepp, Leslie Baum, and Diane Christiansen repurpose their own and others’ creations into new artworks.
Art
Scott Stack Rethinks the Rules of Op Art
A number of Stack’s paintings look as if a storm swept through the repetitive patterns of Op Art, breaking them into shards.
Art
A Blimp Floats in a Gallery, Imagining the View from Space
CHICAGO — The Sidney R. Yates gallery in the Chicago Cultural Center is a large space on the top floor of a neoclassical-style building on Chicago’s Michigan Avenue.
Art
Two Chicago Writers Respond to the Art of Archibald Motley
CHICAGO — An event at the Chicago Cultural Center brought together two strands of African-American culture in Chicago: the wide-ranging exhibition of paintings by Archibald Motley, and an hour of readings by two African-American Chicago writers, Latoyah Wolfe and Eric May.
Art
The Salvation of Kitsch
CHICAGO — Looking at Sabina Ott’s work is like seeing a giraffe for the first time: there are so many odd markings, shapes, and textures that you think it can’t possibly work, until the moment the giraffe stands up on its spindly legs and, defying gravity, walks around.
Art
Who Is the Real Monster in Frankenstein?
CHICAGO — There's an archetypal monster in your mind, and his name is Frankenstein. In a lecture presented this past Saturday, November 9, at the Chicago Humanities Festival, Heather Keenleyside discussed this notorious monster in relation to this year's theme "Animal: What Makes Us Human?"
Art
An Artistic Industry of the Ordinary
CHICAGO — A few years ago, when I spent most of a summer in Prague (Czech Republic), I visited the lapidarium, the museum where they store all the fragments of old statues. I thought of that museum again when I saw Industry of the Ordinary: Sic Transit Gloria Mundi at the Chicago Cultural Center. In