From war loot to Saddam Hussein’s Star Wars obsession, an exhibition at MCA Chicago considers the costs of power and destruction.
Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago
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Pushing Back Against the Sensational Image of Chicago as “Chi-raq”
Amanda Williams, an architect turned artist, has shifted her practice from constructing buildings, to making work that understands and reveals the social implications of how and when they are destroyed.
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The Many Arms of Takashi Murakami’s Career
A retrospective at the MCA Chicago charts the many strands of Murakami’s painting practice, from his early Nihonga style to recent Buddhist iconography.
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Two Projects Revisit Historical Images with a Calm and Critical Eye
Two video installations currently at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) in Chicago place the viewer within images and their history, and demand we look at them differently.
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How Kerry James Marshall Rewrites Art History
CHICAGO — When he studied art history in the 1970s in Los Angeles, Kerry James Marshall was struck by the absence of black artists in the “canon.”
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Reckoning with Pop Art’s Irrepressible Popularity
CHICAGO — Three major exhibitions devoted to Pop art that opened last year broadened the purview of this movement as a primarily Western (American) phenomenon by unearthing lesser-known artists to provide a global view of art in the 1960s and ‘70s.
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Art Museum Oddity Betrays the Bowie-Curious
CHICAGO — This is not really a review of the exhibition David Bowie Is.
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The Pitfalls of Art as Therapy
CHICAGO — Invented in 2011, Zachary Cahill’s USSA 2012 began as a one-off joke, a half-sketched theoretical future where America was reshaped as a socialist nation.
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Chicago Imagists: Art History’s Overlooked Chapter, Now on Film
The Hairy Who is not the backing band of the Austrian pop singer Conchita Wurst. Still, it’s hard to believe the members of the Hairy Who, one of several coteries of artists who came together in the 1960s–1970s under the broader moniker of the Chicago Imagists, would not have celebrated this transgender performer, not so much because she won the Eurovision song contest last weekend or because she is biologically a he, but because, along with voluptuous hair, long lashes and sequined robes, Conchita has a beard.
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Transcending the Surface of Warhol and Marisol
CHICAGO — The Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago’s Warhol and Marisol focuses on the conversational nature of artworks produced by artists Andy Warhol and Marisol Escobar, who got to know each other in the 1960s.
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Take Your Picture with an Oversize Neosurrealist Dream Head
CHICAGO — Amanda Ross-Ho’s giant gray mannequin head is a neosurrealist’s dream come true. Resting comfortably in front of the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, it looks as if caught in preparation for use in a Man Ray photogram. Ross-Ho’s site-specific installation THE CHARACTER AND SHAPE OF ILLUMINATED THINGS calls upon the history of photography while also looking to the future of an internet world where anyone, anywhere, can snap a picture with their smartphone camera and show it to the universe.
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From Ruin to Re-creation: Theaster Gates Returns to Chicago
CHICAGO — Theaster Gates’s installation 13th Ballad at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (MCA) continues his investigation of art objects and social activism, which started in 2009 with the redevelopment of derelict houses in a South Chicago neighborhood, and which he took to a national stage at the 2010 Whitney Biennial, and then an international platform at Documenta 13 (in 2012) in Germany. Gates undoubtedly deserves the current recognition in his hometown, but the exhibition at the MCA is only partially successful as a showcase for his work.