All posts filed under: Featured

Review of RAISIN at 6018North

Published by Susan J. Musich

Featured Image: Installation view. A brown couch sits in a white-walled living room, on the back wall hangs three framed photographs. Image courtesy of 6018North. If you read A Raisin in the Sun in high school and were asked what the play is about, you would likely reply “the experience of a Black family moving into a white neighborhood.” While Lorraine Hansberry’s play specifically depicts the Youngers, a Black family in Chicago, RAISIN, currently on view at 6018North, uses the play’s broader themes as the basis for an ambitious exhibition featuring more than 30 local and international artists working in a wide range of media. In a conversation about the show curator Asha Iman Veal explained that several years ago she came across archival images of productions of the play in Eastern and Central Europe from the 1960s, which led to further research. She found that soon after its Broadway debut in 1959, A Raisin in the Sun was adapted to other local contexts worldwide—by the 1960s it had been translated into 30 languages. The …

Featured image: Gina Hunt, XOXO at 1011 N. 6th Street, Springfield, IL. A colorful, geometric piece hangs in porch. The house is light blue with white trim. Plants grow in front of the porch. Photo by Jeff Robinson.

Snapshot: A Conversation on the Terrain Biennial 2021 with Allison Lacher & Jeff Robinson

Published by Sixty Inches From Center

Featured image: Gina Hunt, XOXO at 1011 N. 6th Street, Springfield, IL. A colorful, geometric piece hangs in porch. The house is light blue with white trim. Plants grow in front of the porch. Photo by Jeff Robinson. Snapshot is a Sixty column that takes a quick look at art history as it happens in Chicago. We send artists and organizers six short and sweet questions to tell us about what they are doing right at this moment. For this feature, we spoke with curators Allison Lacher & Jeff Robinson, who organized the Enos Park iteration of the Terrain Biennial, an international public art festival on view from October 2 – November 15, 2021. Founded in Oak Park in 2011 by Sabina Ott, the Biennial is an act of radical decentralization, taking art from privileged urban centers and bringing it into everyday spaces. As a part of Terrain, there are 24 sites housing public art installations in Enos Park in alone. The theme for this year’s Biennial is K.I.T (keep in touch).   Sixty Inches From Center: …

An abstract composition of blue, pink, yellow, and black shapes. Illustration by Ryan Edmund Thiel.

November Art Picks

Published by Sixty Inches From Center

Featured image: An abstract composition of blue, pink, yellow, and black shapes. 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 Fall, 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 as art workers in …

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.

A Place You Can Go, an at-home performance by Jeffrey Michael Austin

Published by Sixty Inches From Center

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 …

Caroline Kent’s Aesthetics of Encryption

Published by Camille Bacon

Featured image: An installation view of Victoria/Veronica: Making Room. The back of the room displays an abstract painting by Caroline Kent with an organic shape cut out of the wall to its right. The middle of the room contains a desk. The entire room is green. Image courtesy of the artist and PATRON Gallery, Chicago. Photography by Evan Jenkins. I mount the winding staircase that twists, helix like, through the heart of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. Everything goes green as the third floor galleries come into view. My eyes adjust. As I continue to ascend, a once faint grumble — more playful than ominous, a nourishing timbre, like the sound of water seeping around dry roots — begins to swell. My ears adjust.  I am now positioned on the axis of Victoria/Veronica: Making Room, Caroline Kent’s first museum solo-show, presented across two adjacent galleries, which, in tandem, explore the fugitive language forged by an imaginary set of twins “who communicate telepathically across two domestic environments.” My whole body adjusts, oriented now to the resounding tranquility brought …

After, Other, and Before: An Interview with Kehayr Brown-Ransaw

Published by Ian Hanesworth

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, …

Image: Felix Gonzalez-Torres,“Untitled” (Death by Gun), 1990. Print on paper, endless copies. Courtesy of the Collection of The Museum of Modern Art New York, purchased in part with funds from Arthur Fleischer, Jr. and Linda Barth Goldstein. Visitors are welcome to take a piece of paper from the stack that displays images of the 460 victims of death by firearm in the U.S. during one week in May 1989.

Snapshot: American Epidemic: Guns in the United States at MoCP

Published by Sixty Inches From Center

Featured image: Felix Gonzalez-Torres,“Untitled” (Death by Gun), 1990. Print on paper, endless copies. Visitors are welcome to take a piece of paper from the stack that displays images of the 460 victims of death by firearm in the U.S. during one week in May 1989. Courtesy of the Collection of The Museum of Modern Art New York, purchased in part with funds from Arthur Fleischer, Jr. and Linda Barth Goldstein. Snapshot is a Sixty column that takes a quick look at art history as it happens in Chicago. We send artists and organizers six short and sweet questions to tell us about what they are doing right at this moment. For this feature, we sent a few questions to Karen Irvine, chief curator and deputy director at the Museum of Contemporary Photography (MoCP). American Epidemic: Guns in the United States features the work of ten artists who look at the legacy of guns in our country from a variety of perspectives. Irvine explains some of these artistic approaches in the interview below. Sixty Inches From …

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Saint Vitus Dance: Holy Things Dripping Sweat in Lauren Wy’s AUTODESIRE VOL. 1

Published by Annette LePique

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 …

An abstract image made from varying colored tissue papers. Illustration by Ryan Edmund Thiel.

October Art Picks

Published by Sixty Inches From Center

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 …

Eulogy: Jovan C. Speller at Aspect/Ratio Gallery

Published by Persephone Van Ort

Featured image: Jovan C. Speller, “I sat there, Unafraid of the coming night.” Two wooden boards, split in the middle. Across the pair of them is an irregular black blob. On the right hand side, reflective wrinkles of light. In the bottom right hand corner, a seated figure with their back turned to us. Image by Avery Campbell. Courtesy of Aspect/Ratio Gallery. Imagine, you’re newly dead. You (the newly dead) have arrived from the world of the living by way of – you can’t quite recall: you remember a dark cloud branching out from the back of your head and you don’t know if it was spilled from your head or if it was being injected. You think you were seated when it happened, but who’s to say? You, the newly dead, are already beginning to lose conscious memories from your previous life. The experience of this makes you thirsty (or maybe you were just thirsty already, maybe you died from dehydration and your body remembers). In any case, you search for water. The underworld …

Review: Ronald Young’s The Prevalence of Ritual

Published by Del O'Brien

Featured Image: Foreground (R to L): “Gatekeeper” and “(Wake Up Every Morning)”; Midground: “A House Divided;” Background: Inkjet Print. Courtesy of The Kranzberg Arts Foundation. “The objects of art jabbed the viewer low in the abdomen, squeezed his heart, pricked his mind. It communicated with those blind to its artistic excellence, as well as with those who saw.” Noah Purifoy, Junk Art: 66 Signs of Neon The twenty or so impassioned sculptures in Ronald Young’s solo exhibition The Prevalence of Ritual—on view for the summer season at The Kranzberg Arts Center Gallery in St. Louis, where Young lives and works—crack and heave with the blight of the city that birthed them. Invariably, their intensity is arresting, and mostly it’s to good artistic effect. Six large inkjet prints of gutted brick buildings, which hang along the gallery’s perimeter, provide clear context. In one of these photos, the contour of a halved and roofless structure cuts a seizing figure against the sky’s subtler ground. In another, the grain of an old door marbles nicely behind its firm …