Alex Katz @ Gray Gallery, Chicago - "White Lotus" Exhibition

Alex Katz: White Lotus

Gray Gallery, Chicago

July 11 - September 20, 2025

Though titled after the hit television show about a resort hotel and the psychosocial relations of its guests and employees, White Lotus by Alex Katz bears no – or perhaps a mysterious – relation to HBO’s dark comedy. Opened at GRAY’s Chicago gallery on July 11, 2025, two weeks before the artist turns 98 years old, White Lotus is a testament not only to Katz’s nonstop creative output, but also his status as one of the most groundbreaking American artists of both the 20th and 21st centuries. 

Throughout his many years of relentless production, Alex Katz has propelled American painting through his cool, flat depictions of figures and landscapes, and yet, he has also managed to avoid the pigeonholings of Pop, Realism, and Minimalism. As Calvin Tomkins noted in his 2018 profile of Alex Katz for The New Yorker, “He has always had his own direction, which has not been the direction of mainstream art in any of the last seven decades.” This path has always been guided, in part, by the tools of cinema, through his use of monumental canvas, dramatic lighting, and repeating figures.  

Painted in 2023, the year of the artist’s celebrated Guggenheim retrospective, the paintings in this exhibition do not depict characters or scenes from The White Lotus television show – in fact, Katz has only watched part of a single episode. Known for painting people close to him – most notably his wife Ada, son Vincent, and daughter-in-law Vivien-- the figures painted by Katz in this suite are strangers by comparison. They are based on photographs he took while on a beach in Maine, where Katz has kept a summer home since 1954. Each of the eleven paintings in White Lotus portray two beachgoing figures, a man and a woman, with three different pairs depicted. 

Closely cropped onto the figures’ faces and torsos – a technique partly inspired by Italian filmmaker Michelangelo Antonioni – the paintings contain enigmatic atmospheres, alternating between tension and sensuality, delivered in Katz’s signature brushstroke: broad and dispassionate, a seamless marriage of representation and abstraction. As curator and writer Dieter Roelstraete notes in his essay for the forthcoming exhibition catalogue, the figures “aren’t really meant to be ‘people,’ but symbols instead – though symbols of what, exactly, remains eerily, satisfyingly unresolved, frozen in the blinding glare of New England’s summer light.” 

Alex Katz: White Lotus is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue with an essay by Dieter Roelstraete, Curator at the Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society at University of Chicago.

ARTIST ALEX KATZ

Alex Katz (American, b.1927) is one of the most recognized and widely exhibited artists of his generation. Coming of age between Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art, Katz began exhibiting his work in 1954, and since that time he has produced a celebrated body of work that includes paintings, drawings, sculpture, and prints. His earliest work took inspiration from various aspects of mid-century American culture and society, including television, film, and advertising, and over the past five and a half decades he has established himself as a preeminent painter of modern life, whose distinctive portraits and lyrical landscapes bear a flattened surface and consistent economy of line. Utilizing characteristically wide brushstrokes, large swathes of color, and refined compositions, Katz created what art historian Robert Storr called “a new and distinctive type of realism in American art which combines aspects of both abstraction and representation.”

Since the 1950s, Alex Katz’s work has been the subject of more than 200 solo exhibitions and nearly 500 group exhibitions around the world. His work can be found in nearly 100 public collections worldwide, including the Art Institute of Chicago; the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden at the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; the National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institute, Washington, DC; the Philadelphia Museum of Art; The Tate Gallery, London; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, among many others. In 2024, Alex Katz received a National Medal of Arts. 

GRAY CHICAGO

2044 West Carroll Avenue, Chicago, Il 60612

www.richardgraygallery.com

Cameron Gainer: Temporal Dispersions @ Engage Projects, Chicago

Cameron Gainer

Temporal Dispersions

Engage Projects, Chicago

April 4 - May 10, 2025

CAMERON GAINER

Process photo courtesy of Cameron Gainer

“In many ways, every piece of landscape art is a failure of representation. What is fact are the ingredients—light, space, time. What's not is each artist’s subjective interpretation. These landscapes, entropic cyanotypes, eschew affectation and embrace the turbulent, raw, and chaotic qualities of nature, with the result reflecting the process from which the image is formed.” — Cameron Gainer

ENGAGE Projects presents Cameron Gainer’s solo Chicago debut with the exhibition “Temporal Dispersions.” Using the open desert as his studio space, this new photo-based work elucidates enduring themes in Gainer’s art, addressing the ineffable nature of time and the mysteries of perception—recurrent themes that span his artistic career.

Over the last two decades, Cameron Gainer has combined scientific and artistic inquiry in his expansive practice. His past works include using the world’s most light-sensitive camera to capture bioluminescence, casting time out of 4-billion-year-old meteorites, and painting photo-realistic canvases based on satellite images of impact craters named for notable artists, scientists, and thinkers.

A conceptual landscape artist at heart, this recent work, the Temporal Dispersions, pushes the limits of photography in what Cameron Gainer calls “an interrogation of the photographic process and the representation of landscape at the edge of form.”

Working in the arroyos (seasonal riverbeds) of the Sonoran desert, Cameron Gainer begins creating these works by marking a section of land the size of the photographic material. He carefully removes the desert topsoil, which consists of insects, bones, plant material, scat, and primarily silica—the raw material from which photographic lenses are made. He then places this material in a temporary container and lays the photographic substrate onto the prepared ground.

The artist then acts as a human hourglass, letting time pass as he methodically pours the removed soil onto the surface of the paper or fabric. This durational element allows the light-sensitive material underneath to slowly record the time it takes for the displaced landscape to settle and be “exposed” by the elements of gravity, wind, time, and light. The earth acts as the camera, the raw silica the lens, and the desert functions as the focal point.

For the work’s final stages, Cameron Gainer removes the photographic material from the soil and returns the land to its original condition, removing any trace of a human presence. The resultant images are vibrant blue materially direct abstractions, the color of the sky and the ocean—the earth’s counterparts. Simultaneously evoking the most advanced imagery of deep space and a birds-eye view of the melting arctic ice, these meditations resonate with our contemporary ecological condition. For Gainer, the process remains a point of emphasis: he establishes the photographic conditions for an image to be formed, but the results are created by the elements and the landscape itself.

CAMERON GAINER is the founder of The Third Rail, an internationally distributed publication devoted to a discussion of modern and contemporary art, politics, philosophy, and culture. He has had solo museum exhibitions at The New Temporary Contemporary at the Fabric Workshop and Museum in Philadelphia, and the Museum of Contemporary Art at the University of South Florida in Tampa. Group exhibitions include “Spectators, Rendered and Regulated” at Koenig and Clinton Gallery New York, New York; “Midnight Party” at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; “The Paranoia of Time” at Carter & Citizen Gallery, Los Angeles; “The Moon is a Lantern” at Lisa Sette Gallery, Phoenix; and “Portal” at McClain Gallery, Houston. Awards and fellowships include a Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship, Pollock-Krasner grant, James L. McKnight Fellowship, and a Jerome Foundation grant for research.

ENGAGE PROJECTS

864 North Ashland Avenue, Chicago, IL 60622

www.engage-projects.com

Expo Chicago 2025 Hightlights

EXPO CHICAGO 2025 

Navy Pier’s Festival Hall

April 24 – 27, 2025

Featuring over 170 leading galleries from 36 countries and 93 cities, this year’s fair debuts CONTRAST, a new section curated by Lauren Haynes, and showcases a special collaboration with the Galleries Association of Korea (GaoK), alongside standout presentations across the core Galleries section, EXPOSURE and PROFILE. 

“It is a privilege to welcome such a remarkable lineup of artists and galleries to EXPO CHICAGO 2025,” said Tony Karman, President and Director of EXPO CHICAGO. “As part of the Frieze network of fairs, EXPO CHICAGO showcases dynamic presentations that amplify Chicago’s standing as a premier cultural destination. Our sincere gratitude goes to Northern Trust, whose support allows us to continue our commitment to fostering meaningful dialogue through both contemporary and modern art.”

EXPO CHICAGO 2025: CONTRAST

Curated by Lauren Haynes, Head Curator, Governors Island Arts and Vice President for Arts and Culture at the Trust for Governors Island, CONTRAST brings together eight contemporary galleries each presenting artists whose work explores contrasts in culture, identity, and experience.

“CONTRAST will include a vibrant selection of galleries featuring work by artists, including Devan Shimoyama, Esther Mahlangu, Wangari Mathenge, Fahamu Pecou and Chico da Silva, whose work highlights diverse perspectives through visual storytelling” said Lauren Haynes. “This special section seeks to explore contrasts in culture, identity, and experience, with each artist contributing their unique voice to the dialogue. CONTRAST is designed to spark conversation around the artists and artworks on view.”

The full lineup of presentations includes:

- A special presentation by Gray titled So Be It! Asé! Photographic Echoes of FESTAC '77 featuring photographs by members of Chicago’s Black Arts Movement Roy Lewis, Bob Crawford, and K. Kofi Moyo. The presentation is curated by Chicago-based art historian Romi Crawford and unveils documentation of the U.S. delegation to FESTAC '77, the Second World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture, held in Lagos, Nigeria.

- A presentation by Jenkins Johnson Gallery of paintings & painted sculptural objects by multidisciplinary artist and cultural ambassador Dr. Esther Mahlangu, who draws from the abstract geometric mural tradition of the Ndebele people of South Africa; pseudoabstract, organic fibers sculptures by Nnenna Okore; expressionistic representational paintings by Enrico Riley; gestural abstract paintings by Patrick Alston; and poetic, traditional black and white photographs by Andre D. Wagner.

- A solo presentation of new paintings by Chicago-based, Kenyan artist Wangari Mathenge presented by Pippy Houldsworth Gallery. The new body of work titled ReMembering delves into an expansive study of Kenyan, specifically Kikuyu, culture, history and language within a social and political context impacted by the legacy of colonialism.

- Work by Brazilian Indigenous artist Chico da Silva, known for his vibrant portrayals of Amazonian creatures, mythological figures, and personal visions, presented by Galeria MaPa.

- A dual-artist presentation featuring Mexican sculptor Paula Cortazar and French textile artist Isabelle D presented by Gallery Nosco.

- A presentation by De Buck Gallery of several newer works from Devan Shimoyama’s Barbershop and Tarot Series as well as a selection of brand new works by Gommaar Gilliams.

- A group presentation featuring artists Fahamu Pecou, Cosmo Whyte, and Thornton Dial presented by Johnson Lowe.

- A group presentation by Melrose Gallery featuring Pascal Konan, Papytsho Mafolo, Mederic Turay and Clint Strydom.

EXPO CHICAGO 2025: EXPOSURE

Curated for the second year by Rosario Güiraldes, Curator of Visual Arts at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, EXPOSURE spotlights solo and two-artist presentations from galleries ten years and younger. This year’s focus includes galleries from Latin America, particularly Argentina and Brazil, alongside emerging Chicago-based galleries.

Highlights include:

- New paintings by abstract contemporary artist Richard Tinkler, presented by 56 Henry.

- A dual-artist booth featuring Los Angeles based sculptors Maddy Inez and Josh Cloud that engages with elemental materials sourced from the earth in Southern California, presented by Megan Mulrooney.

- A dual-artist presentation of Jimmy Beauquesne and Tyler Christopher Brown presented by Fragment.

- A solo presentation with Chicago-based artist Soo Shin featuring a large-scale installation alongside sculptures and canvases, presented by PATRON.

- A dual-artist exhibition of Kwaku Osei Owusu Achim and Tariq Oliver, two emerging artists with a shared reflection on language, meaning, and memory, presented by Omenai Gallery.

- A solo-booth of Gabriel Martinez. who had an exhibition at the Leather Archives & Museum in Chicago this year, presented by Bill Arning.

- A solo presentation of renowned Brazilian artist Denise Milan, by Zielinsky.

- A solo booth of Jamaican artist Simon Benjamin presented by Swivel Gallery exploring the ocean as a framework for investigating trade, ocean travel, importdominant consumerism, among other neo-colonial relationships.

- A dual-artist presentation by Rivalry Projects of midwestern artists Jen Everett and Ryan Patrick Krueger considering knowledge in queer and Black communities.

EXPO CHICAGO 2025: ACROSS THE FAIR

Notable solo and dual-artist presentations include:

- A selection of iconic early photographs by Rashid Johnson alongside works by Ebony G. Patterson, presented by moniquemeloche.

- A selection of works by Sergio Sister and Thiago Barbalho presented by Nara Roesler. The booth features works produced by Sergio Sister between 1967 and 1971, created during his confinement as a political prisoner during Brazil's military dictatorship.

- An installation by acclaimed interdisciplinary artist Deborah Oropallo presented by Catharine Clark Gallery.

- A solo presentation by ACA Galleries of multimedia Afro-Caribbean American portrait artist, Kandy G Lopez, in her first exhibition in Chicago.

- A solo presentation of renowned artist Juanita Guccione by Weinstein Gallery.

- A solo booth of new sculptures and prints by Vietnam born artist Vy Trinh who lives and works in Philadelphia, presented by Galerie Quynh.

Highlights of group or thematic presentations from notable galleries include: 

- A thematic presentation of artists Melanie Flood, Amanda Ross-Ho, and Evan La Londe by ILY2 considering the prop as a tool of destabilization.

- Michael Rosenfeld Gallery will present the work of Romare Bearden, Bob Thompson, Betye Saar, and Beauford Delaney.

- A presentation by Rhona Hoffman of politically engaged artists centered around three themes: Nature & the Environment with Spencer Finch, Julia Fish, Jacob Hashimoto, Judy Ledgerwood, and Martha Tuttle; Mass Media & Identity with Derrick Adams and Amanda Williams; and War, Violence & Inequality with Gordon Parks, Bassim AlShaker, and Brian Maguire.

- Prints by esteemed contemporary artists Katherine Bernhardt, Elizabeth Peyton, Tschabalala Self, Cecily Brown, and Mel Bochner, presented by Two Palms.

- Works by color-field artists Helen Frankenthaler, Morris Louis, and Kenneth Noland presented by Yares Art.

- A presentation of work by historic 20th century artists Agnes Pelton, Louise Nevelson, and Raymond Johnson, focusing on desert transcendentalism, presented by Addison Rowe Gallery.

- A presentation of historic Afro-Brazilian artists Agnaldo Manuel dos Santos, Mestre Didi, Heitor dos Prazeres, and Rubem Valentim alongside contemporary artists Lídia Lisboa, Maxwell Alexandre, No Martins, and Sidney Amaral, considering ancestral power of the Black community in Brazil, presented by Millan and Almeida & Dale.

- A selection of works by prominent Australian First Nations artists Emily Kam Kngwarray, Warlimpirrnga Tjapaltjarri, Rover Thomas Joolama, Barbara Weir and Naata Nungurrayi paired with legendary Dutch artists Karel Appel and Marcel Pinas, presented by SmithDavidson.

- A reimagination of the 1946 art brut installation at Galerie Rene Drouin, inspecting Jean Dubuffet’s relationship to Chicago and Chicago’s relationship to ‘outsider’ art, presented by The Gallery of Everything.

EXPO CHICAGO 2025: HIGHLIGHTS FROM KOREA

In a significant new partnership, EXPO CHICAGO introduces a collaboration with the Galleries Association of Korea (GaoK), to present a selection of 20 leading Korean galleries within the fair’s core Galleries section. This initiative, supported by the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism and Korea Arts Management Service, builds on the successful synergy between Kiaf SEOUL and Frieze. 

A selection of highlights includes:

- Digital prints by YOON Hyangro that transform pop culture imagery into abstraction by erasing characters and text presented by ONE & J. Gallery.

- PYO Gallery will present The Stillness of Water: Tschang-Yeul Kim’s Final Reflections on the Flow of Life, prominently featuring the artist’s images of water droplets and the contemplations on the concept of water itself.

- A group exhibition From Blindness to Awareness presented by Lee & Bae featuring mixed media works by atelierJAK, Hyojin Park, Lee Sangmin, Jinwook Yeom, and Janghee Jang that explore transformation and perception, including Yeom’s laborintensive embroidery-like paintings.

- Works by Korean artists Jimok Choi, Suzanne Song, and Lee Jaeseok, Kim Doki, Belgian artist Koen Van Den Broek, and Japanese artist Yuichi Hirako, presented by Gallery Baton.

- Abstract paintings by Kwak Hoon and Lee Jung-ji that explore human affairs through layered textures and expressive forms presented by Sun Gallery.

- Masterpieces of six Korean masters Park Seobo, Lee Ufan, and Yun Hyongkeun, presented by WELLSIDE Gallery.

- The works of Yoo Geun-young, a mid-career artist from Daejeon who captures Korea's turbulent history through unfamiliar shapes, vivid colors, and contrasting textures, presented by Gana Art.

- Oil and mixed media impasto paintings by Lee Jaehyun that use thick layers of matiere to evoke personal memories and emotional landscapes presented by GalleryJoeun.

- Hyper-realistic oil and sand paintings on board by Kangyong Kim that simulate photographic realism while questioning perception and illusion presented by The Columns Gallery.

EXPO CHICAGO 2025: PROFILE

PROFILE presents solo booths and focused projects by established international galleries. Showcasing ambitious installations and tightly focused thematic exhibitions, this section features major projects by a single artist or collective.

Presentation highlights include:

- Corbett vs. Dempsey will present a solo booth featuring a selection of historical prints by Diane Simpson. Created over a period from the mid 1970s to the early 1980s, most of these extraordinary works on paper have never been exhibited. Deploying various techniques including collagraphy and collage, the works' images consist of some of the same types of forms Simpson would explore over the subsequent five decades: architectural shapes and ideas drawn from women's clothing. The earliest prints are uncommonly vivid, later ones more subdued, in browns, blue, and grey tones. Made in tiny editions, some in fact unique, these printworks allude directly to the artist's work in three dimensions; one of them was designed to be cut out and folded into a kind of origami sculpture. Diane Simpson (b. 1935) is one of the great artists to emerge from the Imagist period of Chicago art, however, although she studied with Ray Yoshida and was dear friends with Barbara Rossi and Christina Ramberg, she was not herself an Imagist. Her earliest shows were at the legendary Phyllis Kind Gallery, and she has continued to make all her work in her studio in Wilmette. Simpson will be the subject of a major retrospective starting in 2026 at the Sara Hildén Museum in Tempere, Finland, traveling to Mumok in Vienna, Austria in 2027. In October of this year, on its Bluhm Terrace, the Art Institute of Chicago will present Simpson's first ever exhibition of outdoor sculpture.

- A solo presentation of new paintings by Sam Jablon presented by The Pit loosely rooted in themes of lightness and frivolity with mantras such as “No Bad Days” and “Don’t Panic” adding both humor and levity to the work.

- A solo presentation by Charlie James of new paintings and drawings by Manuel López informedf elements found around his environment: from his home, his neighborhood, and studio.

- New work by Los Angeles-based artist Ben Crase presented by PIERMARQ*. Born in the midwest, Crase invents whimsical scenes inspired by his hometown of Butte, Montana and his subjects are living testaments to the eccentricities of the isolated area.

- A solo-booth of Chicago-born Caitlin Cherry by The Hole.

- A large scale installative booth of work by Sami Tsang featuring a free-standing ceramic work and wall drawing by Claire Oliver Gallery.

- New sculptures made with hair-bonding glue by Trinidadian-American artist Allana Clarke, presented by Library Street Collective.

- A solo display of geometric works by Italian artist Esther Stocker presented by Alberta Pane.

EXPO CHICAGO 2025

expochicago.com

Yoko Ono @ MCA Chicago - Museum of Contemporary Art - "Music of the Mind" - Exhibition Overview + Biography

Yoko Ono: Music of the Mind

Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago

October 18, 2025 – February 22, 2026

Yoko Ono

Cut Piece, 1964 

Performance view,

New Works by Yoko Ono, 

Carnegie Recital Hall, New York, NY, March 21, 1965

Photo © Minoru Niizuma

Yoko Ono with Glass Hammer, 1967, 

from Half-A-Wind Show, 

Lisson Gallery, London, UK, 1967.

Artwork © Yoko Ono. Photo © Clay Perry

Yoko Ono

FLY (still), 1970–71

16mm film (color, mono sound)

© Yoko Ono

The Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) Chicago announced Yoko Ono: Music of the Mind, opening October 2025. The MCA is the exclusive US venue for this comprehensive solo exhibition dedicated to artist, musician, and activist YOKO ONO (b. 1933, Tokyo, Japan; lives in New York, NY). Traveling from Tate Modern in London, where it enjoyed record attendance, and in close collaboration with Ono’s studio, this groundbreaking retrospective covers seventy years of Ono’s trailblazing career, with over 200 works including participatory instruction pieces and scores, installations, a curated music room, films, music and photography, and archival materials. The exhibition reveals Ono’s innovative approach to language, art and participation that continues to speak to the present moment.

Participation is an important feature of Yoko Ono’s vision as an artist, which is why visitors will be able to partake in several interactive, instruction-based artworks throughout Music of the Mind. This exhibition underscores Ono’s legacy of radical performance and her significant and influential contributions to visual art, including Fluxus and Conceptualism; music; film, and activism. The MCA is proud to welcome this timely exhibition, spotlighting Ono’s revelatory art from the last seven decades.

“We are thrilled to present Yoko Ono: Music of the Mind here at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago—a celebration of Ono’s expansive practice which continues to challenge the boundaries of artist and audience,” Pritzker Director Madeleine Grynsztejn said. “This exhibition underscores the avant-garde and interdisciplinary roots that made the MCA what it is today—our first performance in 1967 featured Fluxus artists. We’re overjoyed to bring Ono’s work to the MCA, a museum that so truly aligns with her practice and overlaps with her history.”

Yoko Ono: Music of the Mind documents the artist’s career starting with the mid-1950s, exploring her pivotal role in avant-garde circles in New York, Tokyo, and London, including the development of her ‘instruction pieces’, and the active role she played in the formation of Fluxus, the loose art collective and movement founded in New York in the early 1960s. The exhibition highlights key works from across her decades-long career, including her performance Cut Piece (1964), considered a landmark in performance and feminist art; her collaborations with notable musicians such as John Cage, Ornette Coleman, and her late husband, John Lennon; selected activations of instruction-based art from her influential book Grapefruit (1964); her innovative films of the 1960s and 70s including FLY (1970–71) and her banned Film No.4 (Bottoms) (1966–67) which she created as a ‘petition for peace’; recent works such as her ongoing Wish Tree installation, (1996-present); and public artworks that are emblematic of Ono’s commitment to peace activism.

The exhibition features several participatory artworks, such as Painting to Hammer a Nail (1961/1966), Bag Piece (1964), and White Chess Set (1966), among others. Later works like Add Color (Refugee Boat) (1960/2016) encourage guests to write their hopes and beliefs on a white boat and its surroundings, while the installation My Mommy Is Beautiful (2004) gives the public an opportunity to share thoughts about their relationship to their mothers and motherhood and attach photographs of their mother. Additionally, there will be public activations of Ono’s peace-driven artworks on billboards throughout the city of Chicago and on the MCA’s premises.

“Yoko Ono is a wildly influential and significant figure in performance, conceptualism, music, and activism. She has inspired generations of audiences to think differently about the everyday and seeing art,” said Manilow Senior Curator Jamillah James. “It is an honor to host this wide-ranging exhibition, which is a critical opportunity that invites the public to deeply engage with Ono’s many important contributions to visual art in new and exciting ways."

Yoko Ono: Music of the Mind is organized by Tate Modern, London in collaboration with Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf and Gropius Bau, Berlin and curated by Juliet Bingham, Curator, International Art, Tate Modern with Andrew de Brún, Assistant Curator, International Art, Tate Modern. The MCA presentation is organized (curated) by Jamillah James, Manilow Senior Curator with Korina Hernandez, Curatorial Assistant.

YOKO ONO: ARTIST BIOGRAPHY

Yoko Ono is an artist, musician, and activist.

Born in Tokyo, 1933, Ono grew up in Japan, with periods spent abroad in San Francisco and New York. She was the first woman admitted to the philosophy program at Gakushuin University in Tokyo, where she studied before moving to New York in 1953 to attend Sarah Lawrence College.

In 1956, she settled in Manhattan with her then husband, composer Toshi Ichiyanagi. Immersed in a community of artists and composers, Ono began to develop her own art practice, often in the form of instructions that invited the viewer’s participation. In 1960, she rented a loft on Chambers Street in Lower Manhattan and began organizing performances and events in the space with La Monte Young, becoming a vital part of the New York art and music scene.

In 1961, Ono’s first solo exhibition was held at George Maciunas’ AG Gallery in New York. Painting to Be Stepped On, a work of canvas placed on the floor with a card inviting the viewer to step on it, was one of several Instruction Paintings exhibited. Later that year, she gave a performance at Carnegie Recital Hall that included works involving movement, sound, and voice, such as, AOS – To David Tudor, and A Grapefruit in the World of Park.

In March 1962, Ono returned to Tokyo, where she debuted new performances at the Sogetsu Art Center, including The Pulse, and exhibited her Instructions for Paintings, a progression from works shown at AG Gallery. These works, comprised only of written instructions, marked a key moment in the history of conceptual art. Later that year, she performed with John Cage and David Tudor on a concert tour throughout Japan. In 1964, Ono performed Cut Piece and Bag Piece in Kyoto and Tokyo, and self-published Grapefruit, her foundational book of instructions.

In the fall of 1964, Ono returned to New York, continuing to perform and stage events, and pioneering new ways of disseminating her art through advertising and postcard events. She also began making her own films, including Film No. 4, Match and Eyeblink.

In September 1966, Ono was invited to London to perform and lecture in the Destruction in Art Symposium. Remaining in London, she had a solo exhibition at Indica Gallery and Lisson Gallery the following year, showing new conceptual object-based works such as White Chess Set, Apple, and Half-A-Room. During this period, she continued to make films, including a new version of Film No. 4 (Bottoms), and presented a series of performances on her concert tour Music of the Mind.

At her Indica Gallery exhibition, Ono met John Lennon, beginning a personal and artistic relationship in art, music, and activism. By 1969 their conceptual events to promote peace had become world-wide news, including the WAR IS OVER! If you want it campaign, and Bed-In for Peace, held in an Amsterdam hotel room during their honeymoon in 1969 and later in Montreal.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s Ono and Lennon’s activities centered primarily on music, film, and activism. Ono released four solo albums and four collaborative albums with Lennon over just five years, while also making multiple films, including FLY, Freedom, “RAPE”, Apotheosis, and Imagine.

In 1971 Ono had her first retrospective exhibition, This Is Not Here, at the Everson Art Museum. Later that year, her unofficial conceptual exhibition, Museum of Modern [F]art at the Museum of Modern Art was advertised in the Village Voice and documented as a new film.

In 1973, Ono and Lennon announced the birth of a new conceptual country, Nutopia, with “no land, no boundaries, no passports, only people.” In 1975 the birth of their son, Sean Ono Lennon, influenced the couple’s decision to take a break from public life.

In August 1980, Ono and Lennon returned to the studio to record their first album together since 1972. Double Fantasy was released in November and went on to win the 1981 Grammy Award for Album of the Year. Less than a month after its release, Lennon was shot and killed by an assassin outside their home in New York.

Emerging from the tragedy of Lennon’s death, Ono immersed herself in making music, releasing several albums during the decade. “It was the music that made me survive,” Ono said. After a long absence from exhibiting her art in museums and galleries, her 1989 solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art, Yoko Ono: Objects, Film, signaled a renewed interest in her art. She continued to exhibit extensively around the world.

In 2000 Yes Yoko Ono, a retrospective exhibition originating at the Japan Society Gallery in New York toured to thirteen international venues over four years. In 2007, Ono unveiled the IMAGINE PEACE TOWER on Videy, an island off the coast of Reykjavik, Iceland, giving a permanent home to her and Lennon’s long-standing commitment to world peace. In 2009, she was awarded the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the 53rd Venice Biennale. That same year, Ono released Between My Head and the Sky, her first studio album as Plastic Ono Band since 1973. In 2018, Ono released her thirteenth solo studio album, Warzone.

Ono’s work has continued to be honored with numerous exhibitions at some of the world’s most prestigious venues, including The Museum of Modern Art in New York (2015) and Tate Modern in London (2024).

In a career spanning more than seventy years, Ono’s work as an artist and activist remains singularly relevant and continues to challenge the boundaries of artist and audience.

MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART - MCA - CHICAGO

220 East Chicago Avenue, Chicago, IL 60611

mcachicago.org

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Yoko Ono: Music of the Mind (in English)

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Yoko Ono : Lumière de l'aube (in French)

Musée d'art contemporain, Lyon 

9 mars – 10 juillet 2016 

Yoko Ono: Grapefruit (in English)

Moderna Museet, Stockholm 

6 June – 16 September 2012

 

Yoko Ono: Between the Sky and My Head (in English)

BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead 

14 December 2008 – 15 March 2009

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Artist Mike Cloud @ Corbett vs. Dempsey, Chicago - "Circle Chat" Exhibition

Mike Cloud: Circle Chat

Corbett vs. Dempsey, Chicago

March 7 - April 26, 2025

Corbett vs. Dempsey presents Circle Chat, an exhibition of new paintings by MIKE CLOUD. This is the gallery's first show with the artist.

Mike Cloud (b. 1974) is a Chicago-based artist whose complex and vibrant paintings often utilize conventional support materials organized in unconventional ways. Stretcher bars, normally brought together at perpendicular angles, are instead conjoined into star or diamond shapes, one sometimes crossing in front of another like a highway offramp; canvas may be affixed to the front of the bar, rather than stretched around it, and thin strips of canvas might cross the field like streamers or banners. Are Cloud's paintings abstract? This is a complicated question to address. Are they representational? Yes, they represent specific and concrete things in the world – people, places, objects. Do they represent these things through visual likeness? Not so much. Instead, Mike Cloud invokes other forms of semiosis, producing meanings through a variety of means – written language, linguistic permutations, website urls, hieroglyphs, pictograms, and other symbolic imagery such as hand-birds. Again, are they abstract? Yes, Cloud's paintings are abstract in the sense that they condense vast amounts of information into a limited space. In the new works presented in Circle Chat, Mike Cloud has included two canvases that utilize hinges to fold into floor sculptures, one hinged horizontally like a construction site sign ("Oyster Oil"), the other hinged vertically, sitting on the floor like a scrim ("Kingdom of Luang Phrabang"). Highly specific, yet mysterious and spring-loaded, these virtuosic, operatic works are ultimately meditations on the fundaments of painting – color, facture, form, speed – and the relationship between the act of interpretation and being in the world.  

Mike Cloud's solo exhibitions include: Thomas Erben Gallery, NY (2014, 2019, 2024); The Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts, Chicago, IL (2017); Max Protetch Gallery, NY (2008); MoMA PS1, NY (2005). His work has been included in group exhibitions such as Good Weather, Chicago, IL; the American Academy of Arts in Letters, NYC, NY; the Studio Museum in Harlem, NY; Danubiana Meulensteen Art Museum, Slovak Republic; White Columns, NYC, NY; Honor Fraser Gallery, CA; Ceysson & Bénétière, NYC, NY; Green Gallery, Milwaukee, WI; Good Children Gallery, LA; Marianne Boesky Gallery, NY; White Columns, NY; Max Protetch, NY; Apexart, NYC.    

CORBETT VS. DEMPSEY

2156 West Fulton Street, Chicago, IL 60612

www.corbettvsdempsey.com

Albert Oehlen & Kim Gordon @ Corbett vs. Dempsey, Chicago

Albert Oehlen & Kim Gordon

Corbett vs. Dempsey, Chicago

January 24 - March 1, 2025

Corbett vs. Dempsey presents Albert Oehlen & Kim Gordon, an exhibition of new paintings and multi-media works. This is Oehlen’s fifth show with the gallery and Gordon’s first exhibition in Chicago.

In this exhibition, German-born artist Albert Oehlen presents three monumental pieces on shaped aluminum. With enamel paint marks applied directly to the raw substates, which are cut into “omega” shapes similar to those of some newer Oehlen works, these 12-foot-tall, 15-foot-wide metal paintings come equipped with sonic transducers on each of their four adjacent panels. When amplified, the paintings act as de facto speakers and project sound vibrations into the room. Oehlen invited Kim Gordon to make soundtracks for the works. She developed these sound recordings in direct material relationship with the paintings, using the transduced metal plates as amplifiers for her electric guitar. Rather than simply making these sounds for the paintings, she made the sounds on them. Gordon’s bracing improvisations, lasting around 8-minutes each, explore a wide range of colors, from chords, drone, and feedback to electrical noises made with the unplugged guitar cord. The works play intermittently, erupting energetically, then relaxing into silence, their metal forms and the gestural lines inscribed on them supercharged by Gordon’s music. In addition to these three works made collaboratively by the two artists, the exhibition presents a new canvas by Albert Oehlen and a group of small, vibrant paintings by Kim Gordon.

Based between Switzerland, Berlin, Spain, and Los Angeles, Albert Oehlen (b. 1954) is one of the most widely-celebrated contemporary artists. His work has adopted and invented numerous approaches to painting and more recently sculpture. In the last few years, Albert Oehlen has also been writing and directing full-length feature films, including Painter, Bad Painter (featuring Kim Gordon in an acting role), and Yellow. His work has been exhibited in institutions around the world, including recent solo shows at Kunsthalle Hamburg, Germany (2024), Espace Louis Vuitton Beijing, China (2024), Friedrichs Foundation, Weidingen, Germany (2023), and Serpentine Galleries, London, UK (2019).

Kim Gordon (b. 1953) is a musician and visual artist based in Los Angeles. Her latest record, The Collective (2024), was met with widespread critical acclaim and received two Grammy nominations. She has been the subject of a recent solo exhibition at 303 Gallery, New York, and is currently in shows at gnration, Braga, Portugal and Efraín López, New York. Gordon is half of Body/Head and was a founding member of the band Sonic Youth.

CORBETT VS. DEMPSEY

2156 West Fulton Street, Chicago, IL 60612

www.corbettvsdempsey.com

Dan Devening, Allison Jae Evans @ LVL3, Chicago - "Shapeshifters" Exhibition

Dan Devening, Allison Jae Evans

Shapeshifters

LVL3, Chicago

April 20, 2024 - May 26, 2024

Dan Devening and Allison Jae Evans

Courtesy LVL3, Chicago

LVL3 presents Shapeshifters, a two-person exhibition of new works from Dan Devening (Chicago, IL) and Allison Jae Evans (Brooklyn, NY).

Dan Devening and Allison Jae Evans journey through shapes, corporeal gestures, and societal narratives that challenge, evoke, and confront. The intersection of 60s graphic design elements with references to contemporary cultural phenomena, like underground culture and mediated interactions, punctuate the tensions innate in our collective pursuit of connection and cultural advancement.

Shapeshifters is a celebration of rawness and vulnerability, expressing a dynamic interplay of forms that subvert the expected. Harnessing a palette rich with tension, Dan Devening and Allison Jae Evans compel viewers to navigate the buoyancy and despondence within societal frameworks, challenging the gravitas of power and the latent desires that underscore our universal human experience.

LVL3

1542 N Milwaukee Avenue, Chicago, IL 60622

www.lvl3official.com

Free + Open Chicago @ Design Museum of Chicago - 10-Year Anniversary

Free + Open Chicago

Design Museum of Chicago

Through April 3, 2023

The Design Museum of Chicago explores the unique and ever-evolving landscape of design in their latest exhibition, Free & Open Chicago. The exhibit celebrates their 10-year anniversary by showcasing places that are free and open to the public year-round. 

Design surrounds us. Its broad impact and inescapable force drives us – from the planning of our streets to how we protect Lake Michigan. The exhibition creates a database in the form of a map highlighting communities, locations, and free experiences around Chicago. 

The exhibition also features community partners that impact the design of communities all around Chicago. Each has a distinct influence on Chicagoans shared design history while being free and open to the public, just like the Design Museum. Partners range from the National Museum of Mexican Art, the most prominent first-voice institution for Mexican Art and culture in the United States, to the Global Garden Refugee Training Farm, a productive garden started by 42 refugee families from Burma and Bhutan to uplift traditional strengths of refugees from rural backgrounds. Other exhibitors include alt space, Busy Beaver Button Museum, Chicago Bridgehouses, Garfield Park Community Plaza, James R. Thompson Center, Pilsen Arts & Community House

The exhibit also showcases a new poster series dedicated to their most free and open resource, Lake Michigan. Artists from the series include: Amid Alavi, David Alvarado, Alyssa Arnesen, Bridget Bilbo (GingerrBridge), Sage Coffey, CzrPrz, Elloo (Elloo), Josh Epstein (TotesFerosh), Won Kim, Adrianne Hawthorne (Ponnopozz), Jeremy Hlinak, Matthew Hoffman (You Are Beautiful), Rod Hunting, Cheryl Kao, Ashley King, Kelly Knaga, Shawn Smith (Shawnimals), Unyimeabasi Udoh, Helen Wargo, Jo Zhou. 

Finally, the exhibit features a new Little Free Library inside an old converted bank vault. This public bookcase aims to increase access to design and art books for readers of all ages and backgrounds. Contribute by taking or sharing books. 

DESIGN MUSEUM OF CHICAGO

72 E Randolph Street, Chicago, IL 60602

www.designchicago.org

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Krista Franklin @ DePaul Art Museum, Chicago - Solo(s)

Krista Franklin: Solo(s)

DePaul Art Museum, Chicago

September 8, 2022 - February 19, 2023

KRISTA FRANKLIN

Out of Love But Maybe There’s Still Some Romance, 2019

Ink, watercolor, pencil, pen, and collage on handmade paper. 

Photo: Latitude

Chicago-based artist KRISTA FRANKLIN (American, b. 1970) presents “Solo(s),” an exhibition that draws on the artist’s vast range of materials and references. Franklin’s work intersects poetry, popular culture and the dynamic histories of the African Diaspora.

A surrealist at heart, Krista Franklin’s works on display include books, poetry, collages, handmade paper, installations, murals, performances, sound works and sculptures. “The word ‘solo’ often refers to the performance of a single musician,” curator Ionit Behar said. “Here, it highlights the artist’s commitment to collaboration with fellow artists, writers and musicians.”

Krista Franklin creates collages from the text and images of vintage magazines and other printed matter she collects. The DePaul Art Museum created a fully illustrated exhibition catalogue for “Solo(s)” featuring documentation of the artist’s ongoing collage work, handmade paper, book and record covers, and installations alongside her poetry and other writings.

Exhibition organized by the DePaul Art Museum

Curated by Ionit Behar, associate curator of DePaul Art Museum

DePaul Art Museum - DPAM

DePaul University’s Lincoln Park Campus

935 W. Fullerton Ave., Chicago, IL 60614

artmuseum.depaul.edu

Brian Maguire @ Rhona Hoffman Gallery, Chicago - North and South of the Border

Brian Maguire 

North and South of the Border

Rhona Hoffman Gallery, Chicago

September 16 – October 22, 2022

Rhona Hoffman Gallery presents North and South of the Border, an exhibition of new and recent paintings by Irish painter and social activist BRIAN MAGUIRE. The exhibition is comprised of a selection of portraits and landscapes from three different bodies of work: Missing and Murdered Indigenous People (M&MIP), Montana; The Remains, Arizona; and The Aleppo Paintings, Syria. Spanning depictions of scenes and individuals from Montana, Mexico, Central America, Arizona, and Aleppo, Syria, Brian Maguire’s paintings represent the voices of marginalized groups whose stories are not widely disseminated. 

The M&MIP painted portraits, the most recent body of work in the exhibition, was created while Maguire participated in a residency at the Missoula Art Museum in Montana. Missoula is a city near both the Flathead Reservation and the Blackfeet Reservation and proved an apt location for the project. Throughout parts of the United States and Canada, an epidemic is quietly transpiring wherein thousands of Indigenous peoples have disappeared or have been murdered. Brian Maguire’s memorial portraits are rendered from photographs that the family members select, the finished painting being an intimate rendition capturing the likeness and spirit of the subject. There are ultimately two paintings created, one for public exhibitions and one for the family. 

Regarding his The Remains (Arizona) paintings - the second body of work reflected in this exhibition - Brian Maguire says: “...it is the death I record or memorialize in this project. No family would like to retain this image of a loved one, except as needed by a process of seeking justice. My work since 1997 has become increasingly focused on lives lost, often with a political perspective on the event of the loss.” These gestural paintings of skulls in the dirt or a splayed face-down body, as is the case in Arizona 6, reference the migrant crisis at the US/Mexico border, specifically the annual fatalities of Central Americans in the deserts around Tucson, Arizona. The Remains (Arizona) paintings confront issues of migration, displacement, and the dangers forcing those to risk their lives to relocate. 

Aleppo 5 is a commanding painting from Brian Maguire’s The Aleppo Paintings series. Depicting a crumbling and dilapidated building in Aleppo, Brian Maguire first photographically documented the structure during a 2017 visit to Syria before replicating it in his studio. His interest in covering migrant crises through his art transcends specific locations to address the global and widespread issue of forced migration, made more pervasive now due to war, social upheaval, and climate change. The ongoing Syrian Civil War, which officially started in 2011, prompted millions of Syrians to seek refuge in Europe and other surrounding areas, resulting in a major humanitarian emergency. The desolate setting of Aleppo 5 with an isolated passing figure is representative of the trauma inflicted on Syrians and their culture - architecture, infrastructure, art, and history.

Brian Maguire’s investment in social activism stems from his involvement in the civil rights movement of Northern Ireland in the 1970s. He remains committed to making artwork that responds to humanitarian catastrophes, hoping to promote dialogue and support for those afflicted.

BRIAN MAGUIRE (b. 1951 Dublin, Ireland) lives and works in Dublin and Paris. Solo exhibitions have been mounted at institutions and venues such as The Missoula Art Museum (Montana); The Crawford Art Gallery (Cork, Ireland); The United Nations Headquarters (New York); The Rubin Center for the Visual Arts at Texas University (El Paso, TX); Museo de Arte de Ciudad Juárez (Mexico); and The Irish Museum of Modern Art (Dublin, Ireland). His artwork is in the collections of The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Texas; Museo de Arte do Rio, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, Ireland; Dublin City The Hugh Lane, Dublin; Arts Council Collection, Dublin; Crawford Art Gallery, Cork, Ireland; Dun Laoghaire Rathdown County Council, Dublin; National Portrait Collection, Limerick Office of Public Works, Kilkenny Art Gallery Collection, Kilkenny, Ireland; Trim, Ireland; Openbaar Psychiatrisch Zorgcentrum, Geel, Belgium; Trinity College, Dublin; University College, Cork and Dublin; Wicklow County Council, Ireland; Tia Collection, Santa Fe, New Mexico; Gemeentemuseum, The Hague-Netherlands; Jyvaskyla Art Museum, Finland; Liverpool University, UK; and Wolverhampton Art Gallery, UK.

RHONA HOFFMAN GALLERY

1711 West Chicago Avenue, Chicago, IL 60622

www.rhoffmangallery.com

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Mel Bochner Drawings: A Retrospective @ Art Institute of Chicago

Mel Bochner Drawings: A Retrospective

Art Institute of Chicago

April 23 — August 22, 2022

At the forefront of Conceptual Art since the 1960s, MEL BOCHNER (American, born 1940) has produced works in almost every medium—painting, photography, sculpture, prints, and books—yet drawing has always been foundational to his practice. On view at the Art Institute of Chicago, Mel Bochner Drawings: A Retrospective is the first show of the artist’s work to use drawing as its principal organizing focus. Nearly 90 works, including several from the museum’s collection of Bochner’s earliest drawings, have been brought together to highlight all phases of the artist’s career.

Spanning traditional techniques on paper in ink, pencil, and charcoal; oil paint on newspaper; wall drawings in powder pigment; and even stones arranged on the floor, Mel Bochner’s pioneering works helped to redefine traditional boundaries of drawing. Often subversive and imbued with the artist’s signature sense of humor, they coax the viewer into comprehending what they mean.

“The materiality of a drawing is central to its meaning,” Mel Bochner has remarked. “Every medium reveals something but hides something else. A change of mediums can reveal what was hidden, permitting new thoughts to emerge.” 

In challenging any rigid definition of drawing, Mel Bochner and his work have insistently asked the question, “What isn’t a drawing?” The exhibition celebrates this question as it explores Mel Bochner’s central themes of language, numbers, measurement, shape, and visual perception, illuminating his evolving ideas about seriality, temporality, and the slippage between word and image.

Curator Kevin Salatino adds, “We are delighted to present the first comprehensive retrospective of Mel Bochner’s drawing practice, which spans nearly sixty years and draws heavily from his personal collection. Many works in the show have never left the artist’s studio and will be seen by the public for the very first time.”

Mel Bochner Drawings: A Retrospective is curated by the Art Institute’s Kevin Salatino, chair and Anne Vogt Fuller and Marion Titus Searle Curator, Prints and Drawings, and Emily Ziemba, director of curatorial administration, Prints and Drawings. 

ART INSTITUTE OF CHICAGO

111 South Michigan Avenue, Chicago, IL 60603

www.artic.edu

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Charles Williams @ Intuit, Chicago - The Life and Death of Charles Williams

The Life and Death of Charles Williams

Intuit, Chicago

December 10, 2021 – April 24, 2022

CHARLES WILLIAMS (American, 1942-1998)

Untitled (Pencil Holder), 1997

Mixed media, 18 x 19 x 15 in. 

Collection of Shane Akeroyd

The Life and Death of Charles Williams, an exhibition featuring a breadth of work ranging from sculptures to comics by the late artist Charles Williams, stretches across two galleries of Intuit. The exhibition is curated by Phillip March Jones.

Born in Blue Diamond, Ky., in 1942, CHARLES WILLIAMS taught himself to draw as a child by copying comic book figures like Superman, Dick Tracy and Captain Marvel. He moved with his mother and great uncle to the south side of Chicago, where he attended James Wadsworth Elementary School. He continued his education until high school, when he left Chicago with his uncle to return to Kentucky. In the early 1960s, Charles Williams enrolled at the Breckinridge Job Corps Center in Morganfield, Ky., where he sharpened his writing skills, made photographs and created his first comic for the Breckinridge Bugle titled JC of the Job Corps. The comic followed the adventures of teens enrolled in the program, addressing immediate problems of finding a job, voting rights and economic opportunity. In 1967, Williams graduated from the Job Corps program “with flying colors” but was unable to find the kind of employment he wanted and accepted a job in the cleaning services of the IBM corporation in Lexington, Ky.

While working as a full-time janitor, Charles Williams further developed his artistic practice. He continued to create comic narratives, including a mini-series about aliens visiting Earth titled Cosmic Giggles. In the series, the aliens observe racism, disease, economic inequality and pollution, among other earthly problems, and decide to leave our planet. Around this time, Charles Williams began to embellish his house and yard by painting trees and cutouts of Mighty Mouse, Batman and others. He also built sculptures and pencil holders from materials he found at IBM, including discarded writing utensils and melted plastics. He described his pencil holders: “Plastic melts off the machine and it takes certain forms when it hits the floor. It becomes solid with weird shapes. I put them on a stand and paint it, keep it in its unique weird stage, and some of them forms looks like an animal’s brain. Makes you think of a brain.”

Charles Williams made assemblages, drawings, furniture and other works of art in various media until his untimely death in 1998, the result of AIDS-related complications and starvation. In death, he became a catalyst for the kind of change for which he advocated in his comics, drawings and sculptures.

“Intuit is excited to partner with Phillip March Jones to bring an artist new to the museum to the fore with an exhibition that explores the range of subject matters and materials with which Williams worked,” said Debra Kerr, president and CEO at Intuit. “He created a complex and expansive body of work, expressing significant themes still relevant in today’s discourse.”

The Life and Death of Charles Williams—curated by Phillip March Jones with contributions by Paul Arnett, Daniel Fuller, FREAKO, Y. Malik Jalal, Frank X. Walker and Melissa Watt—is the first major solo exhibition of Charles Williams’ oeuvre, initially appearing at the Atlanta Contemporary in 2020. The accompanying publication, Cosmic Giggles by Charles Williams, will be available in the Intuit Store during the exhibition.

PHILLIP MARCH JONES is a curator, artist and writer based in New York City. In 2009, Phillip March Jones founded Institute 193, a non-profit contemporary art space and publisher in Lexington, Ky. He later served as the inaugural director of the Souls Grown Deep Foundation (Atlanta), director of the Galerie Christian Berst (New York/Paris) and Andrew Edlin Gallery (New York). In 2020, Phillip March Jones founded MARCH, a public benefit corporation and gallery dedicated to amplifying the voices of under-recognized artists in Manhattan’s East Village neighborhood. His photographs and writings have been published by the Jargon Society, Yale University Press, Vanderbilt University Press, Dust-to-Digital, Poem 88 and Parker Gallery, among others.

INTUIT - The Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art

756 N. Milwaukee Avenue, Chicago, IL 60642

www.art.org

Vivian Maier: In Color @ Chicago History Museum

Vivian Maier: In Color

Chicago History Museum

Through May 8, 2023

The Chicago History Museum is featuring a collection of many never-before seen works by world-renown photographer VIVIAN MAIER in an exhibition, Vivian Maier: In Color.

“The Chicago History Museum is committed to sharing Chicago stories, and Vivian Maier’s work represents her private contributions to the documentation and representation of culture found within city life,” said Charles E. Bethea, Andrew W. Mellon Director of Collections and Curatorial Affairs. “Maier’s photography brings a glimpse of Chicago and its residents to life between the 1950s to the 1970s, allowing present day visitors the opportunity to reflect on the striking parallels it has to today’s society.” 

Vivian Maier worked as a nanny to several Chicago families and took extensive photos, documenting intimate moments of the city and its people. Vivian Maier: In Color illuminates Maier’s unique portfolio. While her focus of attention varied, she approached all of her work with unwavering confidence, revealing parallels, intersections and tensions.

Following her death in 2009, Vivian Maier’s prolific photographs previously discovered in her abandoned storage locker were first displayed for the public. Vivian Maier rose to posthumous international acclaim for her photography that expertly documented the people, landscapes, light, and development of New York, her hometown, and Chicago where she settled, with remarkable attention to detail. Maier’s work is now used widely in research and curriculum and has been celebrated in at least 42 exhibitions around the world, including one on display at the Chicago History Museum from 2012-2017, Vivian Maier’s Chicago.

To underscore her accomplished photography, Vivian Maier: In Color features more than 65 color images from the 1950s-1970s, most of which have never been seen, from art collectors Jeffrey Goldstein, John Maloof, and Ron Slattery. It is the first time the work in these three collections have been featured together in one exhibition. The exhibition also includes clips from film, made by Vivian Maier, and a series of sound bites and quotes featuring Vivian Maier’s voice.

“Vivian Maier’s photographs show moments of what looks to be a dynamic, multifaceted life in which she prioritized her passion for taking pictures,” said Frances Dorenbaum, curator of Vivian Maier: In Color. “Her dedication to photography is what makes her work so prolific today, and the Chicago History Museum is thrilled to share her voice with the public and celebrate a once unknown artist.”

The exhibition comes after the Chicago History Museum last year acquired nearly 1,800 Vivian Maier color slides, negatives and transparencies from Chicago-based artist and art collector Jeffrey Goldstein. The collection primarily depicts people and scenes in Chicago from the 1950s-1970s. The museum worked closely with Goldstein and Vivian Maier’s Estate to accept a donation of photographs and preserve them for public use. The acquisition gives the public access to many never-before-seen images on the Museum’s image portal. 

To learn more about Vivian Maier: In Color and associated programs, please visit: 

www.chicagohistory.org/exhibition/vivian-maier-in-color/

CHICAGO HISTORY MUSEUM

1601 N. Clark Street, Chicago

www.chicagohistory.org

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Celeste Rapone @ Corbett vs. Dempsey, Chicago - Controlled Burn

Celeste Rapone: Controlled Burn

Corbett vs. Dempsey, Chicago

October 16, 2021 - November 13, 2021

Corbett vs. Dempsey presents Controlled Burn, an exhibition of twelve new paintings by Celeste Rapone. At CvsD, Rapone has been the focus of an eponymous Big Dig virtual presentation in 2020 and Everlast, a two-person exhibition with Betsy Odom in 2018. Controlled Burn is her first solo show at the gallery.

In a group of brand new canvases, Celeste Rapone opens up the space in her detailed compositions, situating figures in an architectural or natural scene. Still figurative and populated by a range of evocative characters, they are now less claustrophobically compressed, the settings providing a theatrical context for morphological feats, sly mass-cultural references, and luscious paint application. Celeste Rapone started work on the paintings in this exhibition in what she candidly calls "the clusterfuck of January, 2021" with no specific trajectory in mind, but over time they revealed themselves to be more about painting itself than anything thematic or topical. Where she has often approached painting as a chain process, a finished piece suggesting the direction for the next one, in this case each canvas took its own journey and gradually became its unique, monadic self, feeding less off its predecessor than off the intense energy of the time and formal and technical problems gyrating in Celeste Rapone's head. Among the diverse, dazzling results are the largest paintings she's ever made, a trend upward in scale that continues at present, as well as some of the most daring and hilarious images in her opus.

CELESTE RAPONE (b. 1985, New Jersey) received her BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2007 and her MFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2013, where she is now an adjunct professor in painting and drawing. Her work has been exhibited at Josh Lilley Gallery (London), Marianne Boesky Gallery (NYC), Zidoun-Bossuyt Gallery (Luxembourg), Roberts Projects (LA), Steven Zevitas Gallery (Boston), Julius Caesar (Chicago), The Hyde Park Art Center (Chicago), the Georgia Museum of Art (Athens), and Monya Rowe Gallery (NYC). In addition to her solo exhibition with Corbett vs. Dempsey, her work will also be included in ICA Boston's exhibition, A Place for Me: Figurative Painting Now on view from March 30 - September 5, 2022. Her work has been featured in New American Paintings, Newcity, The Chicago Tribune, The Georgia Review, and she is a 2018 recipient of a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant. She lives and works in Chicago, IL.

CORBETT VS. DEMPSEY

2156 West Fulton Street, Chicago, IL 60612

www.corbettvsdempsey.com

Jacob Hashimoto @ Rhona Hoffman Gallery, Chicago - Misunderstandings - Text by Stephanie Cristello

Jacob Hashimoto: Misunderstandings 

Rhona Hoffman Gallery, Chicago 

Through October 23, 2021 

JACOB HASHIMOTO

Not every representation of the world will do, 2021

Bamboo, acrylic, paper, wood, and Dacron

56 3/8 x 81 7/8 x 8.25 inches

(c) Jacob Hashimoto, Courtesy of Rhona Hoffman Gallery

At its best, art writing adopts the approach of the method actor: the writer enters the psyche of the artist, and in this act of self-deception, strings together words into a text whose structure adopts how the artist thinks. The reader should leave with the phantom of an encounter that emulates the work. It is a practice in forced empathy that hinges upon the transmutation of the writer’s mind into the artist’s hand. In this process of fictionalization, effective writing about art veers away from translation and description and instead inches toward fabrication and fantasy—a falsehood that communicates visuality more truthfully through text. Harold Bloom called this purposeful misunderstanding of a source (for him literature, but here as art), ‘poetic misprision’; a term that defines how a fact-based reading of reality must suffer to reach closer accuracy. 

For an artist like Jacob Hashimoto (b. Colorado, 1973), in his seventh solo exhibition entitled Misunderstandings at Rhona Hoffman Gallery,  one must  think in layers. The sculptures are made of  dense compositions  of elaborately patterned and collaged  bamboo and rice paper kites. Kaleidoscopic images emerge that reference virtual space, natural environments , the cosmos etc.Though remarkably stable, their images imbue a , movable quality that is closer to woven textiles, or pixels, than to canvas. Working against the demand of linear logic—the urge for artists to provide digestible explanations into the ‘meaning’ behind their work, particularly in abstraction—lies at the core of Hashimoto’s resistance toward the dogmatic impulse, which the artist credits as contributing to “the death of poetry.” The deficiency is not that of language, but how it is instrumentalized. 

Bypassing the persistent and vexing Greenbergian dilemma of painting vs. sculpture—when has it mattered?—Hashimoto’s work encourages us to address stratums of experience. We can imagine a text that portrays being, as if we were the threads of string passing through the eye of a needle. Or tessellating sheets of sliced paper in states of suspension upon a filament. Perhaps passages that observe how flatness is transferred back into atmosphere; two dimensions separated in subtle distances by veils of air. We could adopt the description of a pastoral landscape that has been interrupted. In this collection of wall-based works, angular lines cut through the sky, like the trail of a jet when it passes over a cloudless expanse, or otherwise collect in the vapors cast in deep violet and red light above a field during a twilight thunderstorm.

In Misunderstandings, the titles of the works on view hover between deception and control, as well as types of pathetic fallacy—a literary device that describes exterior natural phenomena to communicate an inner psychological landscape. In each of the three larger compositions, a relationship to nature is approached in the Romantic sense; cues that allude to the anthropomorphizing of the elements (air, water, earth, and fire). In The innocent life of lightning (2021), a highlighter yellow line passes above and below a reddened geometric field. Amid these works, the micro informs the macro, and vice versa. The temporality of Hashimoto’s marks, imbued upon their lasting surfaces as works of art, is cued through the artist’s choice in words. In To catch a glimpse of the sky (2021), a series of five small cumulous forms appear to be made from patches of black starry sky. Upon closer inspection, we see that this effect is achieved through the pattern of white pixel squares upon navy paper. Representation, like a flash of lightning, appears and goes just as quickly—yet the desire for a gestalt effect, to see the recognizable reflected in abstraction, remains. 

Hashimoto’s constructions—the separation and amalgamation of individual parts to compose a whole—evolve in relation to the mind of the viewer. They are not sealed off, but rather functionally and conceptually open. Which is to say that within a global context their meaning changes as the world changes. They encourage viewers to look and learn how to create meaning: this skill of navigation is required by the artist and audience alike. Like mood rings, as the perception of the work moves from person to person, its magic is activated—a way of seeing that is as external as it is a report from the interior.

—Stephanie Cristello

Stephanie Cristello is a contemporary art curator, critic, and author living in Chicago, IL. 

www.stephaniecristello.com 

RHONA HOFFMAN GALLERY

1711 West Chicago Avenue, Chicago, Illinois 60622

www.rhoffmangallery.com

Raphaël Barontini @ Mariane Ibrahim Gallery, Chicago - The Night of the Purple Moon

Raphaël Barontini

The Night of the Purple Moon

Mariane Ibrahim Gallery, Chicago

23 January - 26 february 2021

RAPHAËL BARONTINI

Eweka 1, 2020

Acrylic, ink and silkscreen on canvas. 

Courtesy Mariane Ibrahim. 

Copyright © 2019 Mariane Ibrahim, All rights reserved.

Mariane Ibrahim presents a solo exhibition with RAPHAËL BARONTINI, The Night of the Purple Moon, marking the gallery’s inaugural presentation with the artist and his first solo gallery show in the United States.

The gallery will be transformed into a Galerie des Illustres, an otherworldly environment with large scale portraits on canvas, cloaks, chaps and flags. Fictional heroes and historical reinterpretations embellish subjects from classical and canonical histories: from the Caribbean, Voodoo and magical deities, to function as a way for formerly enslaved humans to hold on to their African identity, despite the violence of Western colonialism. Raphaël Barontini illuminates disparities in the visual and cultural history of the French Caribbean, which is rooted in African ancestry, yet virtually saturated with culture of an insular Caribbean.

The Night of the Purple Moon, is a lyrical coalescence of classical painting and fragments of contemporary culture. The paintings unveil works that adorn and disrupt the architype of heroes and, bestow a counter history and moment of reinvention of the Hero as an assemblage of various synergetic forces. The aim of this estrangement is primarily to alert the spectator of a different perception of the world; to renew the senses by distancing them from their conventional representations. The Night of the Purple Moon then becomes a place to nurture found freedom, creativity and pride.

Inspired by creatives such as Romare Bearden, and Hannah Höch who collaged a handful of materials and ideas to reflect the glitches of modern civilization during their time, Raphaël Barontini meticulously builds a vernacular language of symbolism, artifact, and ritual.

The Night of the Purple Moon, embraces a nocturnal environment, where vibrant purples imbued with magic and new possibilities in which narratives emerge to catalyze a forthcoming revolution. From works on canvas, to large scale textile pieces to wearable garments – the artist presents the possibility of a new visual language, while referencing modern technology. Mixing different eras, spaces and geographies, the composite portraits arise from different types of media.

RAPHAËL BARONTINI (b.1984, France; works and lives in Saint-Denis, France) is influenced by processes of creolization and the philosophies of French Caribbean thinkers. He intentionally depicts real and imaginative heroes from Africa and the Caribbean to present narratives that are under-represented in the dominant history of art. Raphaël Barontini’s installations become site specific, and his works draw attention to architecture by obscuring its legibility and orthodox arrangement, while reconstructing and sharing a sort of counter-history.

Raphaël Barontini’s practice involves bold silkscreens and digital prints that embellish a variety of materials including flags, banners, pennants, curtains, tapestries, capes and more. His primary medium is painting of which he uses to question the classical codes of the bi-dimensional medium. His works are immersive, and have been activated by live performances. They are also often creatively installed as standing or suspended objects. The large scenographies enable him to engage the spectrum of classical painting. The subjects, patterns, and archival material draw attention to postcolonial rhetorical questions and criticisms that confront history and emphasize its present day relevance within large scale streams of information and media.

Raphaël Barontini has exhibited work in galleries and institutions globally including MAC VAL Museum, Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, The Pill, New Art Exchange Museum and the SCAD Museum of Art. He has also participated in international biennales in Bamako, Casablanca, Lima and Thessaloniki. 

He was the 2020 artist in residence in Singapore for LVMH Métiers d’Art.

MARIANE IBRAHIM

437 North Paulina Street, Chicago, IL 60622

marianeibrahim.com