Chicago Style Exhibition @ Georges Adams Gallery, NYC - Featured Joanna Beall, Roger Brown, Leon Golub, Miyoko Ito, Ellen Lanyon, Gladys Nilsson, Jim Nutt, Ed Paschke, Barbara Rossi, H.C. Westermann, Karl Wirsum

Chicago Style

Joanna Beall, Roger Brown, Leon Golub, Miyoko Ito, Ellen Lanyon, Gladys Nilsson, Jim Nutt, Ed Paschke, Barbara Rossi, H.C. Westermann, and Karl Wirsum

George Adams Gallery, New York

December 13, 2024 – February 8, 2025

The George Adams Gallery presents Chicago Style, a group exhibition highlighting key figures from Chicago’s vibrant mid-to-late 20th century art scene. The show features works by Joanna Beall, Roger Brown, Leon Golub, Miyoko Ito, Ellen Lanyon, Gladys Nilsson, Jim Nutt, Ed Paschke, Barbara Rossi, H.C. Westermann, and Karl Wirsum. 

This exhibition traces the development of a unique Chicago aesthetic, shaped by artists from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) and the Hyde Park Art Center. These artists rejected the dominant trends of New York and the West Coast, creating diverse and unconventional work in movements like surrealism, figuration, abstraction, and social commentary. 

The exhibition also reflects their overlapping careers and collaborations, such as the 1949 Exhibition Momentum organized by Golub and Lanyon, which included Ito. The spirit of collaboration continued with the founding of Superior Street Gallery by Ito and Lanyon in the 1950s.

Allan Frumkin Gallery, which opened in Chicago in 1952, played a key role in supporting many of these artists and elevating their work beyond the city. Frumkin gave Leon Golub, and H.C. Westermann their first solo exhibitions in Chicago, and employed Ellen Lanyon as a restorer and Jim Nutt as an art handler, fostering a dynamic creative community. By showcasing these artists in both his Chicago and New York galleries, Frumkin helped establish the unique aesthetic that defined Chicago’s mid-20th-century art scene. 

Works in the exhibition includes paintings from the late 1950s by Golub and Ito, works from the 1960s by Lanyon and Beall, and examples from the 1970s by Brown, Nilsson, Paschke, Rossi, and Wirsum. Of special note is Westermann’s The Death Ship (Black Tar Death Ship) from 1974 that has never been offered since it was acquired by a private collector in the late 1970s. 

GEORGE ADAMS GALLERY

38 Walker Street, New York, NY 10013

www.georgeadamsgallery.com

Miyoko Ito (1918 - 1983): Paintings, Adam Baumgold Gallery, New York

Miyoko Ito (1918 - 1983): Paintings

Adam Baumgold Gallery, New York

November 7 - December 19, 2014

Adam Baumgold Gallery presents an exhibition of paintings by MIYOKO ITO (1918-1983). This is Ito’s second New York solo exhibition since 1978. Miyoko Ito was born to Japanese parents in Berkeley, CA in 1918. She studied art at the University of California at Berkeley for a short time until she was imprisoned in a Japanese-American camp after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Ito continued her education in prison and afterwards went to Smith College. After college, she was given a scholarship to attend the Art Institute of Chicago. It was in Chicago that Ito's career as an artist flourished; exploring cubism and latent abstraction in her works. Miyoko Ito stayed in Chicago until her death in 1983.

The exhibition focuses on Miyoko Ito’s paintings from the 1960’s to 1970’s. These paintings with their subtle mix of abstraction and figuration share the spirit of Matisse’s “Piano Lesson,” the linearity of Diebenkorn’s “Ocean Park” paintings and Paul Klee’s “ability to imbue his images with an inner life that is compelling and magical,” yet Ito’s paintings retain an obstinate independence and original vision that were an inspiration and bridge for generations of abstract and imagist artists in Chicago.

In his essay for the exhibition, Len Klekner says, “Ito’s paintings are in the main abstract, creating and maintaining an alternative universe as a whole distinctly set off from the world we inhabit. But many of her forms are allusive, suggestive of bits and pieces of bodies and the furnishings of our everyday lives. These elements are never resolved enough to overpower the imaginative arenas of her abstract fields. But they are suggestive enough, and perhaps even jarring enough, to lend another level of frisson to her works. Her forms are also often playful, quirky, and even goofy-to the point of contrasting markedly with the quiet authority of her sensitive backgrounds and resonant facture.”

Miyoko Ito’s work has been included in all major surveys of Chicago art including the exhibition “Art in Chicago 1945-1995.” A retrospective of her work was held at The Rennaisance Society at The University of Chicago in 1980. Ito was also included in the Whitney Biennial in 1975, and the Carnegie Insititute’s “International Exhibition of Contemporary Painting.” Her work is in the collections of The Art Institute of Chicago, The National Academy of Design, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, The Smart Museum of Art, Chicago, and The Whitney Museum of American Art, among others.

ADAM BAUMGOLD

60 East 66th Street, New York, NY 10065

www.adambaumgoldgallery.com