Month: November 2018

Review: Static Cling @ Heaven Gallery

Published by S. Nicole Lane

It’s always been interesting, walking into Heaven Gallery and browsing the vintage shop connected to the space on the right hand side. Gold brooches, gaudy necklaces, and fur hats line the wall as the gallery’s cat wanders in to sprawl out on the floor. It’s a gallery I’ve frequented for the past five years. It’s comforting, it’s familiar. It’s no surprise then that two Chicago artists, Nico Gardner and Lauren Carter, decided to respond to Heaven’s unique space and the clothes that fill the empty areas. Nico and Lauren simultaneously nod their heads at the tables filled with the contents from your grandmother’s jewelry box, creating their own reimagining of these pieces through their artwork. Memory, nostalgia, and identity are influential in the collection of pieces inhabiting the gallery. When entering the room, visitors are greeted with a piece entitled Keepsake: two tiny, sculptural, found containers in the shape of rabbits resting on a wall shelf. Lauren adds in hair and nail clippings into her work as a reminder that these objects carry some weight—a human’s contact, a …

Chicago Archives + Artist Project: Artist Profile on H. Melt

Published by Jennifer Patiño Cervantes

The Chicago Archives + Artists Project (CA+AP) is an initiative that highlights Chicago archives and special collections that give space to voices on the margins of history. Led by Chicago-based writers and artists, the project explores archives across the city via online features, a series of public programs and new commissioned artwork by Chicago artists. For 2018, the Gaylord and Dorothy Donnelley Foundation has funded a series of pilot projects pairing three artists with three archives around the city: Media Burn + Ivan LOZANO, the Leather Archives & Museum + Aay Preston-Myint, and the Newberry Library’s Chicago Protest Collection + H. Melt. This series of articles will profile these featured archives and artists over the course of their collaboration, exploring the vital role of the archive in preserving and interpreting the stories of our city as well as the ways in which they can be a resource for creatives in the community.  Join us on December 1, 2018 from 6-9 pm at the Leather Archives & Museum for Artists + Archives: Pilots, which will exhibit the commissioned projects by each artist alongside the archive materials that inspired them, launching CA+AP’s first …

Intimate Justice: Anna Showers-Cruser

Published by S. Nicole Lane

“Intimate Justice” looks at the intersection of art and sex and how these actions intertwine to serve as a form of resistance, activism, and dialogue in the Chicago community. For this installment, we talked to Anna Showers-Cruser in her McKinley park studio about queer identity, relationships to experimentation, and Southern hospitality.  S. Nicole Lane: I’m really excited to interview you because, obviously, I love your work. Where are you from? Anna Showers Cruser: I’m from Richmond, Virginia, and my family’s from southwest Virginia and we hail from Appalachia also. And I went to MICA for undergrad in Baltimore and lived there for a while. And then went back to Richmond, kind of was interested in that small-town or Southern city kind of art scene there, but I definitely kind of wanted to go to a bigger city for grad school. I went to UChicago and that was a cool program because it’s small and interdisciplinary but, as you know, part of a larger institution. So that allowed me to do a lot of play and exploring in my …

Mister Wallace and the Vessel of Futurehood

Published by Chelsea Ross

Erik Lamar Wallace II, a.k.a Mister Wallace, a.k.a It Girl, a.k.a Mister Cool Mom, is about to blow up. Erik Lamar Wallace II, a.k.a Mister Wallace, a.k.a It Girl, a.k.a Mister Cool Mom, is already iconic. Rapper, singer, producer, label founder, gender defier, culture maker, makes it all fashion, cosmic being, Wallace talks like a soothsayer. Which is to say she talks fast. She talks deliberately. She says about six things at once. They all hold together with an audible alchemy that precedes logic, but they hold there too, if you can catch it. She declares. The declarations sound like spells. Like whole hands and fingers reaching into a future only she can see to extract truths for us to roll around in our palms like rocks that turn to sand if you’re not quick. This is also how she performs. Wallace co-founded Futurehood with DJ/producer aCe a.k.a aCeb00mbaP (Anthony Pabey) in 2016. With artists like Roy Kinsey, Hijo Prodigo, Rozay Labeija, and Wallace themself on the roster, as a record label, Futurehood is the vehicle responsible for some of the most cogent, relevant, and hype-worthy sounds, visuals, and artists to come out …

A Win for Humanity: Interview with Dominique Steward of BBF Family Services

Published by Eric K. Roberts

Dominique Steward and I met at the first of several open houses to be held at BBF Family Services this year as part of the Envisioning Justice initiative. Entitled “Powerful Platforms: a Community’s Call to Action,” the open house was designed to bring awareness to the concerns central to Envisioning Justice, which invites Chicagoans from around the city to address the impact of incarceration in their communities. (I also met BBF Family Services President and CEO Rufus Williams at the open house, which included a roundtable discussion on police-community relations.) Steward moved from a longtime career at the College of DuPage to BBF Family Services in North Lawndale three years ago. After starting in development for the organization, she is currently the Envisioning Justice North Lawndale Hub Director.  I recently sat down with Steward on a quiet Saturday morning at BBF to discuss her vision for subsequent Envisioning Justice programming. I work for UCAN, another social service agency in North Lawndale, so I was particularly curious about her previous work on the agency’s development side, and …

Art Against the Flow and a Semantic Ecotone

Published by Emily Breidenbach

As I walk into the gallery space, I’m greeted by vibrant and seemingly disparate groups of artworks. On one wall, there are bold, schematic line drawings of Chicago architecture. To my right are totem-like sculptures with intricate embellishments. Across the way is a collection of flat landscapes with skewed perspectives. This is Chicago Calling: Art Against the Flow, an exhibition on view at Intuit: The Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art as part of Art Design Chicago. Throughout the show, it seems that the curators Kenneth Burkhart and Lisa Stone refrain from hand-holding me through a chronological, step-by-step development of an artist or artistic movement. As I trace my way through the space, pausing at each work, I soon realize that the absence of a consistent, linear narrative may be the point. Intuit’s mission is to celebrate the power of outsider art, which they define on their website as “the works of artists who demonstrate little influence from the mainstream art world and who instead are motivated by their unique personal visions.” With this in …

Drawing on Anger: Eric J. Garcia

Published by Jennifer Patiño Cervantes

Eric J. García combines art, politics, and history in his work, creating sharp critiques of the U.S. through a Chicano lens with the goal of educating and challenging the viewer.  And it’s his ability to draw the connections between history and contemporary politics that make his work especially powerful. As an artist, García creates using a variety of media including printed posters, sculptural installations, public art, and political cartoons. Some of the work from his long-running and incisive political cartoon series, El Machete Illustrated, was recently published in a collection called Drawing on Anger: Portraits of U.S. Hypocrisy by Ohio State University Press. I got a chance to ask him about the process of creating this book, how his work challenges traditional political cartoons in the U.S., and the importance of collective anger. Jennifer Patiño Cervantes: Can you tell us about your book? How did it come about and how did you come up with the title? Eric J. García: “Drawing on Anger” is the best of my El Machete Illustrated series of political cartoons …

Poetry Series: Therefore We Can Be Free (Part 3)

Published by Asha Futterman

“The white fathers told us, I think therefore I am; and the black mothers in each of us-the poet- whispers in our dreams, I feel therefore I can be free” —Audre Lorde, from Poetry is Not a Luxury I aim to write a series of poems centered on the real and imagined landscapes of Chicago. While poetry isn’t often thought of as news, poems, more than anything, describe the truth of the world around us. While truth can come out of diligent and factual reporting, it can also be revealed by a few honest words that intimately and imaginatively give language to the unseeable pain and joy present in Chicago. There is so much more to Chicago than the fact of it and its events, there are universes of feelings that come out of the landscape we live in that break the bounds of reality. adolescence growing up is best        black    lonely      i am almost twenty    i dont want to get on the L right now          met four people i don’t like in a row  …

November Art Picks

Published by Sixty Inches From Center

Our Art Picks are created in collaboration with The Visualist, Chicago’s leading visual arts calendar, and cross-promoted through Windy City Times, one of the longest locally-published LGBTQ weeklies with a national reach. This is a growing list, so check back often for new additions. Throughout 2018 we will be highlighting exhibitions and events that are part of Art Design Chicago , a year-long celebration of the unique and vital role Chicago plays as America’s crossroads of art and design, creativity and commerce, organized by the Terra Foundation for American Art. As part of an editorial partnership with Illinois Humanities, Sixty will also be highlighting events that are part of Envisioning Justice , a 19-month project that looks into how Chicagoans and Chicago artists respond to the the impact of incarceration in local communities and how the arts and humanities are used to devise strategies for lessening this impact. November Art Picks Thurs, Nov 1, 11am Art Against the Flow Summit  Ace Hotel Chicago: 311 N Morgan St, Chicago, IL 60607 Free Thurs, Nov 1, 2-4pm Chicago New Media Symposium  Gallery 400: 400 S Peoria St, Chicago, IL 60607 Free Thurs, …

Interview with Musician Bailey Minzenberger

Published by Cecilia Kearney

Bailey Minzenberger is a Chicago singer songwriter whose music focuses on themes of love, loss, and intense emotion. Their debut EP, “Queen Anne’s Lace,” combines acoustic guitar with hauntingly beautiful lyrics to evoke an intimate listening experience, currently available on Bandcamp. Writer Cecilia Kearney had the chance to talk to Bailey and discuss their relationship with music and identity. Cecilia Kearney: Lets start with some background; tell me a little bit about yourself. Bailey Minzenberger: I was born and raised in Evanston and Rogers Park. I haven’t really left the area for an extended period of time, which I would like to change—I am changing, which is exciting. I feel really grateful to have grown up there; Evanston is a really cool place. I’m currently writing my own music. I would like to [have a] full band, but since it’s just me right now, it’s usually just acoustic guitar and vocals. Usually when I write music, I can hear the entire band in my head as I’m writing, so it’s really cool when I can get a …