In this iteration of FOLD/UNFOLD, row särkelä talks with Gilda Norris of Gilda Designer Thrift Boutique in Hyde Park. Gilda creates a hub of energy that allows people to tap in to their style dreams, to connect with other fashion lovers, and even to create a daytime place to see and be seen.
Disabled Sancutary is a series in which carrie sarah kaufman chats with disabled artist friends about what their disabled sanctuaries look like. In this interview, carrie talks to the brilliant writer and artist, Rise.
EXTENDED BREAKDOWNS is a series of interviews and prose unearthing niche, often undocumented histories within Chicago’s dissipating nightlife (pre-pandemic). In this iteration, Jared Brown talks to multidisciplinary artist and DJ All the Way Kay.
Michael Workman tells Sixty about his piece Ghost Army on display at the 2021 Terrain Biennial.
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: …
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?
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.
Laurie LeBreton tells Sixty about the installation Collective Effervescence on display at the 2021 Terrain Biennial.
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.
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 …
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, …
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 …
Featured image: A view of “Dreamscapes: Imaginings of a Black Pastoral” at Roots and Culture. Two the left is a doorway covered in sheer green fabric that leads into a room with a video piece on display. The right side of the image shows a hallways leading to a larger room with additional artworks. Photo by Colectivo Multipolar. Entering the space of Roots & Culture on the opening night of Dreamscapes: Imaginings of a Black Pastoral, you are transported through a portal into the familiar realm of fellowship. For me, in the fellowship found in the hall of my childhood Baptist church, a gathering space designated for the communal unravel immediately following Sunday morning service, or in the fellowship found in the yearly ritual of my family reunion, a tradition of Black joy where familial cohesiveness can be restored, generational collectivism is centered and celebration is key. Aunties, grandmas, cousins you didn’t know you had, family friends and friends of friends all coalescing for one singular premise: communion. Walking through Dreamscapes: Imaginings of a Black …
Featured image: Sam Fissell is in a backwards crouching position on the floor with his back to the viewer. He is wearing tan trousers, a white tank top, and white shoes with a white cloth tied around the ankle. Photo by Ryan Edmund Thiel. FOLD/UNFOLD: fashion designers and artists on dress, tactics, community, and power in zhegagoynak/zhigaagoong (Chicago) and beyond. Sam Fissell’s light-washed apartment is sparse, modular, and neat. As a fashion designer, he has made the space feel ready for anything. Fissell’s approach gives a mix of precision and unpredictable intensity – someone who gets things done, but who also wildly trusts collaborators and leans into the unknown. Talking to and witnessing Fissell, you can feel his commitment to process over product and to the relationships and inheritances that make fashion matter to begin with. Care emanates from him as he picks minute pieces of dust off a garment we’re documenting from his most recent collection, crossing his legs to showcase the white leather boots his friend made for the collection. He holds that …
We hope this exhibition serves as a reminder of the resilience of art in a social context. Over the last year and a half, through the conditions of a global shutdown and time marked by a renewed social justice movement and chapters of political turmoil, sculpture remained in the streets. Public art has the unique pleasure of being available to everyone, all of the time.
Featured image: Mehran Salari, Untitled, 2017. Monoprint and pencil and pen, 40×40 cm. A black and white image that is largely abstract with a group of organic shapes. Image courtesy of Didaar Art Collective. Last Spring, Didaar Art Collective, a cooperative group of Iranian artists based in Chicago, organized a group show titled Space: Chapter One at Oliva Gallery. The exhibition was on display from April 9 to May 8, 2021, and featured drawings and printmaking by twenty-nine emerging Iranian artists. Toward the end of the lockdown, I visited the exhibition. I was yearning for a moment of reflection on the intricacies of our spatial bound beyond the insipid private experience in front of my laptop screen. This was an experience that I had greatly missed, and the exhibition, beyond its visualizations of space and possibilities, was uniquely positioned to give insight into the ongoing contested-over space in Iran. It was refreshing to see how these artists work around the difficulties of the current moment while standing their ground during a time of mass oppression, …
Featured image: 007, Shan Wallace, 30 x 24 x 1.75 inches (framed in black) (76.2 x 61 x 4.45 cm) 30 x 24 inches (unframed) (76.2 x 61 cm), 2020. A black and white showing a group of people dancing. Courtesy of the artist and FLXST Contemporary. The words “won’t you celebrate with me“—the title of Erin LeAnn Mitchell and Shan Wallace’s duo exhibition at FLXST Contemporary in Chicago—comes from the title of a poem from acclaimed Black poet Lucille Clifton. In the poem, Clifton declares for a celebration of her shapeshifting, of her molding, and of her becoming simply true to all of the multitudes that live within and through her. Clifton points to the challenges and obstacles that she’s faced and understands that the world may want to take her tenderness and joy away, but she crafts her own worlds where she is undoubtedly celebrated, uplifted, and loved for her triumphs everyday. In their two-person exhibition, artists Mitchell and Wallace continue this declaration of jubilee, pointing to a Black femme supremacy that complicates …
FOLD/UNFOLD: fashion designers and artists on dress, tactics, community, and power in zhegagoynak/zhigaagoong (Chicago) and beyond. When you first walk into fashion photographer Madeline Hampton’s apartment/studio, the number “27” painted on the entrance wall in chaotic white strokes doesn’t assert itself as separate from the overall industrial aesthetic of the space. It takes time to notice that this is a signal that Hampton, also known as “27,” lives and works here. It’s an uncanny and highly personal visual that feels appropriate for an artist who based a recent shoot around Yves Tumor’s feeling of licking an orchid. Hampton makes cinematic fashion images that don’t so much attract you to double-tap, but instead compulse an ongoing encounter with the picture. Hampton’s power to interrupt the scroll culture of Instagram feels like a power coming from somewhere not quite here–an offering to feel otherwise through the medium of fashion photography. The colors hit somewhere in your jaw, the angles glimmer. It feels possible to be both here in the material body and moving in a dream dimension. …
“…regardless of what the times hold, as a collective, we have found ways to center love and care as an invaluable asset to community building.”
Writer and artist Olivia Popp speaks with members of BIPOC Playwrights about the group and its evolution, the process of creating a space that combats white supremacy culture in theater, and existing and thriving together as BIPOC artists.
A conversation with Alexander Martin, Erick Minnis, and Brenda Pagan, founding members of The Peoria Guild of Black Artists.
The following article is part of Unreasoned Scores, a series of six articles edited by Fabiola Tosi, Juelle Daley, and Stephanie Koch, the 2019-2020 HATCH Curatorial Residents with Chicago Artist’s Coalition (CAC). When social distancing posed a challenge to building community between the artist residents of the program, Daley, Koch, and Tosi created a structure for artists’ interviews which asked: How can we be isolated together? Through a series of exercises, curators encouraged artists—paired together based on artistic practice, experience, and personalities—to connect through a series of interviews with one another. The goal was to foster a human-scale connection between artists, beyond the hyper-mediated space of online meetings. With this experimental editorial project, the curators seek to investigate “How does one archive ephemeral works which may not fit the formats of a traditional archival record?” Read part 2 of Unreasoned Scores featuring artists Ellen Holtzblatt and Salim Moore. Katie Chung and José Santiago Pérez, edited by Fabiola Tosi When meeting someone for the first time, maybe even after a few conversations, you would get to …
Sweet Bitter Love, presenting artist Jeffrey Gibson’s reflections on representations of Indigenous peoples in cultural institutions, is now on display at the Newberry Library through September 18, 2021. Responding to a series of late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century portraits by Eldridge Ayer Burbank in the Newberry collection, Gibson (a member of the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians and of Cherokee descent) refutes the stereotypical imagery that has reinforced pernicious myths about Indigenous people for centuries. As he enters into critical dialogue with the collections of the Newberry and also the Field Museum, Gibson’s works attest to the resilience of Indigenous cultures. The exhibition is part of Toward Common Cause: Art, Social Change, and the MacArthur Fellows Program at 40, which is organized by the Smart Museum of Art in collaboration with exhibition, programmatic, and research partners across Chicago. Analú López (Guachichil/Xi´úi), Ayer Indigenous Studies Librarian at the Newberry, recently spoke with Gibson about his evolution as an artist, the challenges of presenting the complexity of the past through art, and how his work might surface silenced …
Tshab Her discusses what is was like to grow up as a second-generation HMong-American, her latest artwork, and creating space through art and storytelling as a HMong-American artist.
Nelissa Carrillo, a Chicago-based fashion designer, runs Ciprianamía, her fashion label that references her Mexican culture and her parents’ style from the 70s.
Kioto Aoki’s exhibition “Breathe, Fibers of Papers Past” at the International Museum of Surgical Science is the result of a residency she had at the institution last fall, during which she photographed and researched the museum’s history.
Fashion scholar Rikki Byrd talks about the relationship between Black death and clothing, becoming a fashion academic, and inspiring Black fashion designers and thinkers.
Jeane Cohen’s solo exhibition of paintings at Zolla/Lieberman Gallery works with psychological themes, spiritual animals, and angels drifting in and out of focus.
LaNia Sproles’ and Ariana Vaeth’s works push against the notion that depictions of Black people in art is inherently political, opting for an actualization of self through pleasure and love.
Flowers for Ourselves are conversations that celebrate and show love to the writers, artists, and editors who work largely behind the scenes with Sixty.