Review: between all saints day and halloween at Roman Susan
Kevin Stuart’s vibrant paintings in between all saints day and halloween answers the question of what one does in the interim moments of our lives.
All posts filed under: Archives
Protect Your Magic: A Cautionary Tale of Witchcraft, Anti-racism, Activism, and Commodification
In recent years, Occultism has left the niche world of counterculture and has become part of the mainstream’s obsession with commerce, capitalism, and social recognition.
Devising as Possibility in Links Hall’s Links Lab Project
Links Lab is an ongoing series of performance-media projects devised by Chicago dancers, performance artists, storytellers, musicians, filmmakers, technologists, designers, and multi-disciplinary visionaries.
alt_ Offering: A Guide to Principles
alt_ Chicago offers guiding principles to community-driven work and practice.
Darlene Blackburn, Dancer of Time
Since the 1960s, Darlene Blackburn has influenced the history of American and African dance in profound ways, spreading knowledge and the love of African dance in America.
In the Pages of Fleeting Monuments for the Wall of Respect
Fleeting Monuments for the Wall of Respect, composed by editor and art historian Romi Crawford, is a meditation, offering, and homage for the Wall of Respect.
Mourning Racial Categories: I’m White Like You, Right Mom?
The film I’m White Like You, Right Mom? explores the felt separation and uncomfortable realizations that come about when a child is classified as a different race than one of their parents.
To Speak For Yourself: On the Many Lives of Dorothy Burge
Dorothy Burge is a fabric and multimedia artist and community activist who is inspired by history and current issues of social justice.
Review of Hal Fischer Photographs: Seriality, Sexuality, Semiotics at the Krannert Art Museum
Hal Fischer’s photographic career blossomed in San Francisco in the 1970s, a post-Stonewall and pre-HIV/AIDS era that has since gained legendary importance within queer communities.
Desde los archivos: Si sabes, sabes
Celebrando una nueva era para nuestra publicación, presentamos una nueva serie Desde los archivos. Este proyecto ha sido creado para volver a visitar una selección de artículos e historias realizadas por la artista y poeta Natalia Villanueva Linares.
Desde los archivos: Why DEMO Matters
Celebrando una nueva era para nuestra publicación, presentamos una nueva serie Desde los archivos. Este proyecto ha sido creado para volver a visitar una selección de artículos e historias realizadas por la artista y poeta Natalia Villanueva Linares.
For the Land and Love of Freedom Fighters: Erin Sharkey, Zoe Hollomon, and The Fields at Rootsprings
Zoe Hollomon and Erin Sharkey co-run The Fields at Rootsprings in Annandale, MN, a site of healing and rejuvenation that centers queer and melanated artists, organizers, and healers.
biskaabiiyang: An Interview with Juleana Enright
Juleana Enright is an Indigenous queer writer, curator, and DJ living in Minneapolis.
How to View a Solar Eclipse: Both And at Tiger Strikes Asteroid
Both And at Tiger Strikes Asteroid traces and cultivates a dialogue between five contemporary artists and Chicago-based artist Miyoko Ito through their use of color, time, form, and space.
Seeing Something New: Discussing the “avant-garde” with printmakers Ben Blount and Sonnenzimmer
A look at the process of designing the catalogue and poster for Chicago Avant-Garde: Five Women Ahead of Their Time at The Newberry Library.
A Retelling of Contemporary Art History at The Block Museum
Featured Image: Dawoud Bey, Untitled (Chicago), 1993. Polaroid color prints. Gift of Sari and James A. Klein in honor of Lisa Corrin and Peter Erickson, 2014.4.5a-b. © Dawoud Bey. Two side-by-side photographs of a young man and a young woman show them with subtly different poses and expressions. Image courtesy the artist and Stephen Daiter Gallery, Chicago. I spent more than 20 years of my professional career as a museum educator. My self-proclaimed mission was to help visitors connect with artworks in ways that were meaningful, accessible, and interesting. After seeing Who Says, Who Shows, What Counts: Thinking about History with The Block’s Collection, I came to more fully understand my role in a system that privileges certain voices and viewpoints. While exhibitions are generally created by curatorial teams, it’s people like me who also help create legacy by selecting which artists and artworks to discuss with the public. Although museums and galleries are becoming more inclusive and are offering alternative histories, the standard trajectory of art history is one that has been dominated by …
Tracing the Hours: An interview with Irina Zadov & others on archives and what time it is
Irina Zadov’s portrait series and accompanying conversations, “What Time Is It?” began only a couple of months after quarantine. It is a long process of asking Grace Lee-Boggs’ question: What time is it on the clock of the world?
“We were not invented yesterday”, in c/o: practice at The Luminary
in ℅: practice at The Luminary presents modes of community engagement, institutional commitment, and artist making that are informed and invigorated by Black Feminist thought and histories.
Review – Shara Hughes: On Edge
A review of On Edge by Shara Hughes at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis
Mourning Racial Categories: The Categories of Black & White
Mourning Racial Categories engages the visual and performing arts to tell the stories of how people in the United States were divided into a handful of unequally valued racial categories, such as Asian, Black, and White.
Talking about the earth without meeting on it: A virtual workshop about human connection with the environment
The Astral Residency at Compound Yellow is focused on working with artists living outside of the art space’s physical community.
Mourning Racial Categories: Let Our Loss Be Heard
Mourning Racial Categories engages the visual and performing arts to tell the stories of how people in the United States were divided into a handful of unequally valued racial categories, such as Asian, Black, and White.
Do I Want to Be A Mother?
I read books about mothers because I want to understand motherhood. I read books about mothers because I’m trying to answer this question for myself: Do I want to be a mother?
A Place You Can Go, an at-home performance by Jeffrey Michael Austin
Featured image: Jeffrey Michael Austin in their home studio performing A Place You Can Go. They are playing a keyboard and seated in front of three windows, which are illuminating the room with natural light. The space around Jeffrey is filled with different types of houseplants. Jeffrey Michael Austin is an artist, musician, and maker living in Pilsen, Chicago. As a musician, they compose, perform, and produce for Growing Concerns Poetry Collective (in collaboration with McKenzie Chinn and Mykele Deville), Daisy Days (in collaboration with EJ Hill), and under the solo moniker Young Elder. Their at-home performance, A Place You Can Go, was performed and recorded during the summer of 2021. Alongside this featured performance, we asked Jeffrey a few questions about its creation. Jeffrey Michael AustinCancer Sun / Cancer Moon / Leo AscendantResidence: Pilsen, Chicago Sixty Inches From Center: Is there a story, path, or journey that you were thinking about while creating your at-home performance, A Place You Can Go? Jeffrey Michael Austin: Much of the process of producing this video felt like …
After, Other, and Before: An Interview with Kehayr Brown-Ransaw
Featured Image: Nico Sardina, Here We Are All Up In Arms (Ultimate Henry’s Comfort Zone PT 2), 2021. A pair of documentation photos where the left image shows a sculpture of a house, multi-colored and slightly askew. The house is made out of different fabrics with many patterns and colors. The image at right shows a close up of the back of the house where a soft body-like form occupies a cavity in the house. Photos by Michelle Caron-Pawlowsky. This interview is the first in a series with each of the current fellows at the Emerging Curators Institute (ECI), a Twin Cities-based organization that supports emerging curators through a year-long fellowship program that incorporates mentorship-based learning, professional development, and financial support. ECI is the first organization of its kind in the Twin Cities region and provides curatorial opportunities to Minnesota-based curators that are otherwise hard to come by. ECI supports four curators each year and is currently in its second fellowship cycle. Operating within the Minnesota arts community, ECI connects its fellows with local curators, …
Desde los archivos: El virus de la escasez y la cultura de la abundancia
Celebrando una nueva era para nuestra publicación, presentamos una nueva serie Desde los archivos. Este proyecto ha sido creado para volver a visitar una selección de artículos e historias realizadas por la artista y poeta Natalia Villanueva Linares.
A Review of Soft Power, Hard Margins at table
Attempting to comprehend all of the messages in the work made me feel like an art history student again, looking at an image and desperately trying to grasp the meaning or understand what my professor was saying.
Saint Vitus Dance: Holy Things Dripping Sweat in Lauren Wy’s AUTODESIRE VOL. 1
Featured Image: Installation shot of AUTODESIRE in Gallery Two of Western Exhibitions. Center image sits a square wooden table and two chairs where visitors can request specific volumes of AUTODESIRE. To the right of the table, volumes of AUTODESIRE are closed and mounted on the gallery wall. Each piece’s wooden spine lists the artist’s last name, volume number, and title where appropriate. To the left of the table, two pieces are exhibited on the gallery wall. A final piece is displayed on the wall directly behind the central viewing table. Photo by James Prinz, courtesy of Western Exhibitions. Alice through the looking glass, St. Teresa’s translucent veined ecstasy, Sylvia’s rhinestone tears trickling to wet the country ground. Fantasy is hard work; tell that to the Sadeian Woman or Louise and her spiders. Our scene opens at the end of the world, it’s a blazing stage. Take the man at his word when he says, “I am become death.” Lights, camera, ACTION! Beneath the desert’s floodlight suns and Planet Hollywood’s unearthly glow, a champagne orgy twitches …
October Art Picks
Featured Image: An abstract image made from varying colored tissue papers. Illustration by Ryan Edmund Thiel. If you’ve followed us for a while, you know that our Art Picks offer a wide scope of events that are relevant to our audiences because we and the artists, cultural workers, curators, spaces, and projects we support live full lives that know no boundaries. We maintain expansive practices and work toward justice for BIPOC, LGBTQIA+, and disability communities in Chicago and the Midwest. Created in collaboration with The Visualist, Chicago’s leading visual arts calendar. Click here to get our Art Picks and latest articles delivered to your inbox monthly. This is a growing list, so check back often with new additions. This month, the first Chicago Arts Census will be initiated. The Chicago Arts Census is the first comprehensive, cross-discipline data collection effort in the city created by and with the art workers of Chicago. The Census is a collaboration between ACRE and Annas in partnership with Sixty Inches From Center, DataMade, and C.A.M.P. The Census is built to amplify our voices …
Desde los archivos: Motivación inquebrantable: la marca de Victoria Martínez en Chicago
Celebrando una nueva era para nuestra publicación, presentamos una nueva serie Desde los archivos. Este proyecto ha sido creado para volver a visitar una selección de artículos e historias realizadas por la artista y poeta Natalia Villanueva Linares