The Gapers block was published from April 22, 2003 to January 1, 2016. This site will remain archived. Please visit Third Coast Review, a new website created by several UK alumni. ✶ Thank you for your readers and contributions. ✶
I decided to take the plunge and write the last post on Gapers Block and put it on hold for about an hour. I was a conditional page editor for a year and a play/fiction writer for almost three years. Fewer than many senior GB authors, but during that time I wrote 284 articles. I will miss Gapers Block very much. It’s intellectually and emotionally uplifting to have a place where you can regularly write about the arts that I love – theater, art, design, architecture, and sometimes books or music.
My first article was published in May 2013 on the book club page. This is a feature of 70s punk rock artist Richard Hell, best known for his “Please Kill Me” shirt. He talks, answers questions, and signs his new book in a book basement on Lincoln Avenue (I dreamed I was a very clean bum) and I was lucky to see the bass player and singer next to the Voidoids, Television and Heartbreakers. It helped even more when the book club editor asked me to write an essay about him.
It may be your father’s pop art, but the work featured in the new Museum of Modern Art exhibition is still fresh and interesting. The art that shocked the world’s art elite 50 years ago still has stories to tell today.
Organized by MCA, Neo-Pop Art Design brings together 150 pieces of art and design in a show full of wit and audacity. It reminds you of how Andy Warhol’s “The Art of Campbell’s Soup Can” was initially ridiculed by the uninitiated. That’s when elite collectors woke up and started buying Warhol.
Uncovering the truth, telling untold stories, and letting go of traumatic adversity can serve as spiritual and emotional cleansing. At Corinne Peterson’s “Kane” project, Chicago attendees are invited to participate in their clay and porcelain workshops and share their traumas to see them shine. People were ordered to create a “stone” out of clay to represent their inner darkness or trauma, and then create a small symbol of light out of porcelain. After the seminar, Peterson showed a mound in the clay “rock” and placed a porcelain token over the stele as a cloud of hope.
Currently at the Lillstreet Art Center, Peterson’s Cairn and the Cloud: Collective Expressions of Trauma and Hope, created by members of more than 60 workshops, includes many clay sculptures that invite meditation and reflection.
I sat down with the artist at two meditation seats in the exhibition space and discussed the ideas behind Kane’s project and the universality of trauma and hope.
Students, photographers and Chicago history advocates are immersed in Richard Nichol’s ode to the city and its memory. But the typical nickel discussion is just a legend: people who gave their lives for construction.
Fortunately, Chicago-based Urban Archives Press has published his second book about photographer and activist Richard Nickell: Dangerous Years: What He Sees and What He Writes. This book is a special opportunity to get to know Nickel’s work and at the same time learn about him as a person through more than 100 photographs and another 100 documents, many of which were written by Nickel by hand.
Leaflet with a letter about Nickel’s studies at design school and an early self-portrait.
Eight young Iranian photographers representing different geographical regions of their country recently held a rare exhibition at the Bridgeport Arts Center at 1200 West 35th Street. The exhibition continues to this day.
Journey Inward features the work of a larger project involving eight Iranian photographers portraying their country with empathy. The project consists of two parts. First, artists participate in training to learn from others in the industry through workshops and other resources. The exhibition is the second part of the project.
You may have noticed street banners paraded downtown or loyal customers, but next month the One of a Kind Show and Sale returns with its 15th Annual Holiday Sale. The artisan shopping event will bring together over 600 artists, artisans and designers from across the United States.
On November 13, the Elephant Room Gallery opens a new exhibition by Illinois native Jennifer Cronin, whose new project Shuttered features a collection of rundown neighborhoods in the far south, realistic drawings of houses. The following is an email interview that talks about Cronin’s beginnings in painting, interest in Chicago architecture, and attention to detail.
Eerie and terrifying events have given us all pleasure in this warm autumn weather. Witches and squirrels in the hallway are already eating pumpkins on the porch, and I hope I’m not the only one expecting spooky fears this Halloween season. So, here’s a list of 14 exciting theater productions and other artistic activities (in no particular order) for you to celebrate Halloween this year.
Chicago’s only “retro entertainment” destination gives you a reason to enjoy burlesque, comedy, circus, magic and party life every night until the end of October. There is no one here except witches Cabaret on the theme of witches on Mondays at 19:00. Nightly productions at 8pm bring another magical experience to the Uptown Underground, featuring gore, striptease, circus arts and more. 21+ Advance booking recommended. Click here for more information.
This year will be the 17th Benefit Art Auction held by the Chicago Museum of Modern Art after five years. Works by over 100 artists, from paintings to sculptures, will be auctioned off this Friday with over 500 guests.
In the past, the MCA has held art auctions for museums with great success. In 2010, the museum raised $2.8 million from bidders and was able to spread the proceeds over several fiscal years. “All money goes directly to support the MCA’s core mission,” said Michael Darling, James W. Alsdorf’s chief curator, whose responsibilities include fundraising for programs and education at the museum.
Fragments of our psyche are stitched together to form coherent memories; the joy of observing and celebrating everyday tasks through visual connection, dialogue, and aesthetics is at the core of Lynn Peters’ sculptures and clay works.
At the Lillstreet Arts Center, the exhibition “Spontaneity Made Concrete” focuses on snapshot stories of life. Her works, hanging on the walls, depict animals, people and forms that contribute to the assembly of several planes that exist at the same time. In addition, Peters uses photography and text to activate viewers, combining multiple media as a backdrop for a sculptural core. Stolen Moments is a large-scale work featuring four sculptures, each named Statue of Liberty, The Thinker, Mona Lisa and Untitled, a ceramic logo of the same name, and a black and white photograph. The work, both thematically and presented, is the most experimental in the exhibition, using imagination, fragmentation and vision as sources of insight. The image of the cart outside the Ark Thrift Store is in Wicker Park, with four sculptures on the wall in the background. While the store was littered with clothing, furniture, and knick-knacks, Peters noted that the outdated and broken cart was the symbol of the Ark for the area. Inside the car, as in the Ark, there are unknown secrets, a bunch of rags and last year’s fashion trends.
VICO in Mexico City is a video project that hosts workshops and workshops that encourage the study of experimental cinema and cinematography. Recently, VICO presented for the first time in Chicago the exhibition “Antimontage, Correcting Subjectivity”, including a series of short films made by students at a workshop led by Javier Toscano. Co-hosted by Little House and Comfort Film, the show features 11 short films from non-traditional artists or creators who don’t consider themselves artists at all.
The featured film is a series of misappropriated images, YouTube videos, and political contexts that span the cultural and digital realms of Mexico. In Dulce Rosas’ My Sweet 15, several young women participated and performed on their quinceañera. Traditionally, these women wear lavish dresses, jewelry, and make-up for their 15th birthday. In the short film Rosas, the artist uses footage of girls dancing, celebrating and getting ready for the upcoming party. At the beginning of the film, a girl is crying and hugging. She represents one or more future roles in the quinceañera. The short was honoured, as several clips feature the girls awkwardly dancing with dolls or posing next to expensive cars. At first glance, it looks like an All-American teen prom.
The Chicago Expo 2015 weekend show at the Navy Pier Festival Hall featured 140 galleries from around the world. In a festive atmosphere, THE SEEN, the exhibition’s independent editorial affiliate, released its first print issue over the weekend, and /Dialogues hosted three action-packed days of panel discussions and talks. IN/SITU provides large-scale installations and site-specific work in spacious halls inside and outside the Navy Pier.
The most memorable piece of the IN/SITU project, probably due to its location, is Daniel Buren’s Three Windows, which lights up the space and emits color as it hangs from the ceiling. The remainder of the exhibition was lost in the rush of visitors, and the aroused body was focused on the smaller items in the booth, glancing up at what was upstairs and drawing in sales.
Artists like John Rafman or Paolo Sirio, who primarily use Google Street View as their medium, create evocative and disturbing images that often blur the boundaries of legal privacy issues. While photographing people on the streets, alleys and lawns around the world is exciting, these artists also use the public and other tools to conceptualize the public realm. Since 2007, the panorama technology featured in Google Maps and Google Earth has become a strange and often easy way to see places that people have never visited or didn’t want to visit.
Imagine Mark Fisher, a public collector of his designs, and his recent exhibition Hardcore Architecture in Franklin. Before Mark’s admissions reception, I interviewed him via email.
This weekend, over 30 invited artists will present their work at the Around the Coyote Festival at the Flat Iron Arts Building in Wicker Park.
There is a three-day festival around Coyote that celebrates the arts and artists of Wicker Park. From Friday to Sunday, visitors can enter the Flat Iron Arts Building to visit artists’ studios, listen to live music, and watch theater performances. The festival begins with a gala dinner on Friday from 18:00 to 22:00.
Synesthesia, as the name suggests, is “a sensation experienced in parts of the body other than the simulated part” and is most commonly associated with music viewed as color. Notable cases of this condition include David Hockney, Duke Ellington and Vladimir Nabokov.
In an ongoing exhibition at the International Museum of Surgical Sciences, Stevie Hanley explores everyday experience and expands the limitations of a single action to a broader exploration of more than one perspective, emotion, and association. Hanley translates medical conditions into the form of art exhibitions. His ability to relate color and imagery to personal chilling and curious observations is featured in the Synesthesia exhibition.
The International Museum of Surgical Sciences is filled with medical instruments, equipment, inventions and stories that contributed to the bizarre and somewhat mysterious conditions seen in the exhibition. Hanley invites viewers into two gallery spaces; both include video projections and installations, and only one includes Dolly Parton buzzing.
Petr Skvara’s “Approaches” exhibition, consisting of enamel paintings on a grid and a collection of fragments titled “Wreckage, Wreckage, Lagan and Outcasts”, is currently on display at the Andrew Rafach Gallery in River West. The drawings are based on flag semaphores used for communication between ships, and their meaning is repeated in the title. Some paintings depict meanings that can be seen together, such as “I’m drifting / Will you give me my place” (2015, enamel on grid). However, other works have a different, unfamiliar meaning as collections of statements. One painting reads: “You are in danger of being stranded / I am moving forward,” a grim expression for those in need.
The gallery’s press release for the exhibition “Approximation” mentions the beauty and sublime that are associated with the idea of a ship on the vast expanses of the sea. Another way of expressing the sublime is the desire to achieve perfection in the precise lines of the semaphore, nevertheless a more human approach to painting than to screen printing.
Chicago-based architecture firm VOA Associates, Inc. was selected as the winner of a six-month architectural design competition funded by the Richard H. Driehaus Foundation.
VOA Associates will design the Pullman Art Space in the Pullman Historic District, which will include 45 affordable apartments for living and working, as well as classrooms, exhibition space and workshops. Artspace Project Inc. headquartered in Minneapolis with offices in Los Angeles, New Orleans, New York, Seattle and Washington DC.
By creating the creative space, VOA Associates hoped to respect the historic “signature of the iconic Pullman District” and welcome those interested in creative weaving into the public realm.
A total of 20 architectural firms were represented and 10 semi-finalists were selected. The three finalists each received $10,000 to refine their concepts, and VOA was selected as the winner. Pullman Art Space is committed to maintaining Pullman’s status as a leading arts community by providing an immersive creative hub for its residents.
As of October 4, nineteen sculptures by Chicago sculptor Charles Ray fill three large galleries on the second floor of the Modern Wing of the Art Institute. Most of the works are figurative and tell their own stories, such as Sleeping Woman, a life-size stainless steel sculpture depicting a homeless woman sleeping on a bench. But some of them are shockingly non-figurative, and two of them shocked museum curators.
“Unpainted Sculpture” (1997, fiberglass and paint) is a faithful recreation of a 1991 Pontiac Grand Am Crusher. Ray was looking for a suitable wrecked car – not too wrecked – and took it apart so that each part could be built from fiberglass and then assembled into a car. Several people spent five days assembling the sculpture at the Modern Wing Gallery.
I’ve only been to Hancock Tower once and never thought I’d visit an art gallery, but hey, there’s a first time for everything. Having fun, I found myself among a large group of tourists and photographers posing and smiling near a huge sculpture hanging from the ceiling of the hall. To access the space, I had to stop at a security desk where my driver’s license was scanned and I was given a barcoded receipt that allowed me to enter through a futuristic gate. As soon as the door opened, I was in the elevator and finally got the opportunity to watch the art. Creeping up to the glass doors of the Richard Gray Gallery, I felt out of place and out of place.
Founded in the 1960s, the gallery has been an important creative hub for artists from Chicago and New York. The gallery is geared towards collectors, emphasizing the importance of fine art, authenticity and quality. Magdalena Abakanovic, Jan Tichy and Jaume Plensa are some examples of artists represented by the Richard Gray Gallery.
The newest Body Building exhibition opens on July 6 under the lobby of the main hall of the gallery and will present the work of Susan Rothenberg and David Hockney. The Body Building, curated by Gan Ueda and Raven Mansell, presents work from the 1900s to the present day and focuses on the relationship between the human form and how it is viewed through an architectural lens. The works in the exhibition cover the period from 1917 to 2012 and showcase a variety of materials and media including wax, ink, wool, pencil and collage.
The Museum of Modern Art continues to boldly explore the fusion of fine art with other creative forms. The recently opened exhibition “Principles of Freedom: Experiments in Art and Music 1965 to the Present” celebrates the 50th anniversary of the Chicago experimental jazz group the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), which continues to push the boundaries of jazz.
The exhibition, which opened on July 11, occupies the galleries on the fourth floor of the museum and consists of several large installations and walls of vibrant paintings that reflect the color and life of music. Numerous archival materials such as photographs, posters, record covers, banners and brochures provide a rich historical context.
Wabash Lights has begun raising funds for a public art installation under the letter “L” on Wabash Avenue as part of their Kickstarter campaign. By transforming the flyover from the lake to Van Buren into an interactive and public exhibition of light and color, Wabash Lights will draw visitors and locals alike. In less than two weeks, the Kickstarter campaign has more than half reached its goal, but full funding is still required to fund the beta test setup. This test will resolve any technical and design issues within 12 months. Once the beta is complete, the capital investment will fund the final installation.
The project will include more than 5,000 LED lamps located under the tracks on Wabash Avenue. Plans for the first phase include expanding more than 20,000 feet of lights along two blocks from Madison to Adams. Wabash Boulevard, a normally dimly lit area of the city, will be updated by two designers, Jack Newell and Seth Unger. Visitors can not only admire the different colors, but also interact and design how the colors and shades look. Using a smartphone or computer, people can program and design LED lights to their liking.
To donate and earn rewards like Facebook Shouts, party packs, t-shirts, artist dinners and more, support the project on Kickstarter.
The latest exhibition at Mexico’s National Museum of Art, Exiled Aliens, will showcase the work of Chicago-based artist Rodrigo Lara. The exhibition, which opens on July 24, will include specialized installations dedicated to politics, immigration and social justice. The work primarily depicts Mexican repatriation in the 1930s and the resettlement of people of Mexican descent to the United States.
Aliens Destroyable will open Friday, July 24 with a reception from 6:00 pm to 8:00 pm and will be on display at the Kraft Gallery until February 28, 2016.