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Lina Bo Bardi: Together, Graham Foundation, through July 25, 2015.

The architect Lina Bo Bardi, born Achillina Bo in Rome in 1914, made Brazil home in 1946. She went there with her husband Pietro Maria Bardi initially to create the Museu de Arte de São Paulo. In 1969, she designed the concrete and glass museum, that lives on as a landmark of Brazilian modern architecture.

This exhibition, curated by Noemì Blager, celebrates Bo Bardi as humanist and architect, and is responsible for my biggest case of house lust to date. In 1951, Bardi designed Casa de Vidro (Glass House) in a district in São Paulo called Morumbi. It’s a modernist masterpiece, an elevated pavilion of glass and concrete that floats atop hill lush with vegetation.

The installation design by the London-based design firm Assemble Studio is the other reason to come. Thick felt curtains reshape the rooms on the second floor into intimate curvy spaces with exhibition cases made of metal and concrete—two of Bo Bardi’s favorite materials. Film installations by Tapio Snellman document the activity and the space of the SESC Pompéia, a gym and cultural center designed by Bo Bardi in 1982.

It’s the ground floor that I return to, where there are photographs in light boxes by Iana Marinescu of the Glass House. Visitors are encouraged to sit in Bo Bardi’s bowl chairs originally designed in 1951. Arper, the Italian furniture design company reissued the chair a few years ago and is donating money raised from the sale of the limited edition of chairs to support the Instituto Lina Bo e P.M. Bardi. The organization and archive is housed in Casa de Vidrio, where Bo Bardi lived until her death in 1992. Until I can travel there, I will content myself with Zeuler Lima’s comprehensive book published last year by Yale University Press.

Photo: Courtesy of Assemble Studio

#linabobardi #grahamfoundation #truthlopez

The X Y coordinates for last night‘s stops at 4100 west and 4400 south calls for some deeper analysis that involves light beams and a healthy disregard for the center (unless beer, football & misplaced priorities are your thing). But not here. Last night was the closing party for filmmaker Marco G. Ferrari’s at Blanc Gallery on south MLK where out on the expansive patio, the artist projected video against an outside wall while Frank Orrall spun. It was divine even if the only one dancing was Loie Fuller in one snippet. Fire pits, salmon cakes, subdued crowd, and a nearly full moon. Luftwerk’s Refractions at Silent Funny on Chicago Avenue runs through May 29 and beckons my return. Two pieces by this artist team (Petra Bachmaier and Sean Gallero) are meditations on water (I just slapped down my inner critic for going with “meditations on....” because this space, this event, these works complete with a composition by Owen Clayton Condon, is close to holy.) This work could easily hold its own in a palazzo on a canal at, say, the Venice Biennale. To think, we might have seen this level of work projected along the Chicago River instead of ... well ... let’s not bash the theater artists, let’s bash the city officials for hubris.

#chicagofirefestival #truthlopez

ruthlopezvelez

DePaul Art Museum/Rooted in Soil (ends April 26)

We are stardust and this exhibition is golden. Image above is a detail from Claire Pentecost’s richly sensory and information-packed installation Our Bodies, Our Soil that makes clear not only how the soil gives us nourishment, but how we can nourish the soil. It’s a relationship that requires reciprocity to remain healthy. What is our connection to the earth (in all its meaning)? We are of it, we depend on it, walk upon it, manipulate it, return to it and, hopefully, won’t completely destroy it. Pretty and putrid are on display here in varying forms. A 17th century vanitas by Adriaen van Utrecht in the upstairs gallery catty corner from Sam Taylor Wood’s Still Life, a video depicting a centerpiece of fruit in a performance of decomposition, rounds out the idea of the cycle of life. California artist Julia Goodman’s beet papyrus brings a pure appreciation of this root vegetable’s staining power (and how eating them is like eating the earth).

No fun at the fun center. On US 12 from Ann Arbor to Chicago. The day before, at Trinosophes in Detroit, I fall in love with Giacamo Fiore’s LP iv: american electric guitars playing softly in the background. Writers are scattered around the tables, Yusef Lateef’s work on the walls of the gallery. I study the good doctor’s lines and try to play the music to them in my head while the tea steeps. Then I tune in to Giacamo. Here. Listen.

Be a tree.

The Sergeant to his army in David Greig's Dunsinane. Completely enthralled (as in no checking of time). This & Mariano Pensotti's Cineastes at the MCA on Sunday afternoon — it truly does not get much better than these two plays.

#truthlopez #mcachicago #shakespearechicago

The bookshelf in the video room of the Doris Salcedo MCA exhibition:

Mieke Bal, Of What One Cannot Speak

Jean-Luc Nancy, The Ground of the Image

Selected Poems and Prose of Paul Celan (Norton paperback edition)

Emmanuel Levinas, Humanismo Del Otro Hombre

EL, Totalidad E Infinito

Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx

Michael Kelly, A Hunger for Aesthetics

EL, Humanism of the Other

Paul Celan, Obras Completas

JD, Espectros de Marx

JD, Adios a Emmanuel Lévinas

Guerin & Hallas, The Image and the Witness

EL, Totality and Infinity

Juan Gelman, Otromundo

Avery Gordon, Ghostly Matters

Andreas Huyssen, Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory

JD, Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas

Juan Gelman, Unthinkable Tenderness: Selected Poems

Five earlier monographs on the artist (for her or us?)

#truthlopez

Museum of Contemporary Art / Chicago / Doris Salcedo (ends May 24, 2015)

What is dumbfounding about the museum's $64 million announcement is that there is no support for Doris Salcedo to undertake a public project in Chicago, yet the focus of this spending spree is community engagement. Scrap the new logo and restaurant plans. Food as art/food as culture is not a new concept and spending all that money (really, you couldn't work with local designers for any of this?) to move the restaurant to the ground floor so that it will be hot for a minute isn't worth the resources. You know what is? ART.

The Colombian artist Doris Salcedo creates works that are, by turns, meditations and indictments of violence and political terror. Her public works are represented in this exhibition by a video produced by the MCA. In it, she discusses the concept of a memorial informed by gang violence. An image on the screen shows an illustration of a site with the Chicago skyline. I think that the spot suggested is in the open lands south of Roosevelt and east of Ashland. It would be a perfect site. At the press conference I ask if there are plans to make this project happen in Chicago and am told that they wanted to, but they can't. The artist seems uncomfortable and I don't push. I wish I had. Why isn't it possible? This is a beautiful little show (well, Plagaria Muda in the entrance is too squashed and deserves the soaring ceilings of the first floor to breathe). Sadly, it could have been epic. Must it remain a lost opportunity?

image above: detail of Untitled, 1995

#doris salcedo #mcachicago #truthlopez

...every song worth writing will carry the DNA of rock 'n' roll...

Greil Marcus, on the how/why/what/when of writing The History of Rock 'n' Roll in 10 Songs during presentation at Old Town School of Folk Music on 2/19/2015.

INTUIT: The Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art / Chicago / Welcome to the World of Mr. Imagination (ends April 25, 2015)

Mr. Imagination, born Gregory Warmack in 1948, was a beloved figure in Chicago’s outsider art community. This exhibition is the first comprehensive look at his work since his death in 2012. (My review of this exhibition will run in an upcoming issue of Raw Vision.)

The short review had me stymied for days because I wanted to explore the impact of collector interference/support, yet there was no concise and/or cohesive way to fold that thought into the space. There also wasn't room for a sensible transition. The idea was only an observation screaming for more attention. I put it aside and met the deadline.

Curator Martha Henry writes in the catalog essay, "Lisa Stone, then director of Carl Hammer Gallery, was moving in 1988, and she gave the artist her brother's collection of bottle caps." Bottle caps became one of Mr. I's signature materials—from objects and furniture to wearables (i.e. his bottle cap encrusted cowboy hat). Stone also took him along on a class trip (she was teaching at SAIC) to see The Grotto on the grounds of the Holy Ghost Church in Dickeyville Wisconsin. After that introduction came commissions for Mr. I to build grottos. Another supporter encouraged Mr. Imagination to leave a wire dress he had created for one of his plaster figurative pieces unplastered. He was introduced to the concept of minimalism and was inspired to create his series of "Dancing Dresses." The piece in the image above was a commission by a collector who owned a printing company who sent the artist old printer's wood type and plates to work with. The commission came at a particularly difficult time in his life; Mr. I had just endured a second studio fire.

All of the above interactions are acts of generosity and there is nothing wrong with any of it, but it does have an impact on the work that is worth exploring (thesis anyone?). Mr. I is not the only example of a visionary artist who has been directed and supported by patrons. So, when a self-taught artist studies the work of another self-taught artist, and their work is informed by that study, how does it change the process? That is not the exact question but it is close enough. I have drawn neither negative or positive conclusions. I know for sure I am not interested in attending a silly workshop to make paintbrush people a la Mr. Imagination. Godspeed museum education people.

I keep a file — with gallery business cards, scribbled notes, brochures — on the art I love enough to want to live with & one of those is the video piece Still Life, 2001 by Sam Taylor-Wood. I first saw it at Donald Young Gallery in Chicago. If I see 50 Shades, it will be to see what this artist, who now is known as Sam Taylor-Johnson, created as director.

FIELD MUSEUM / Vodou: Sacred Powers of Haiti

(ends April 26, 2015)

You know what you are going to learn at this exhibition? Probably what you already know instinctively—that our understanding of Vodou is nil and/or based on really bad movies featuring zombies and pin cushion dolls.

You know what you should learn, but won’t because theinterpretive materials are scant? Most of Haiti’s cultural heritage is endangered.

You might dig deeper because you want to know more about theincredible mirrors, or about the bizango—secret society—of which all thecontents of a recently dismantled meeting house are on view but, unlike all theother objects in the two exhibition halls, these are enclosed behind a curving wall with tons of small windows where viewers could take a peek. Why so protected? Is it about spirits?

This exhibition was organized with the help of several institutions including the Foundation for the Preservation, Enhancement and Production of Haitian Cultural Works. The initial run in European museums was designed to call attention to the fact that ritual objects were being sold and taken from the country. Marianne Lehmann, a Swiss who has lived in Haiti for most of her life, purchased her first vodou object in 1986 from someone who was going door to door trying to raise money for a sick priest. This exhibition was built from the more than 3,000 objects she has collected since.

When the earthquake struck in 2010, killing more than 250,000 people, and destroying homes and much of the nation’s infrastructure, Haiti’s rich cultural heritage (museums, libraries, archives) was also severely damaged. The cultural collections that managed to be saved were stored in poor conditions or remained trapped under rubble. If Vodou heritage was in trouble before that catastrophe, what do you imagine is the status today?

My research led me to the Cooper Hewitt, which sent a team to Haiti as part of the Smithsonian’s Haiti Cultural Recovery Program. Those conservators worked on Marianne Lehmann’s collection. She was lucky, her collection was not destroyed but it also had never been properly stored or documented.

So go see this exhibition, and thank Marianne, and thank the ancestors.

#truthlopez #Haiti #Vodou #Field Museum

Steam your crinolines and bowlers. Plans are being hatched for summer party to be co-hosted by dearmissvalland.typepad.com.

#Ruth Lopez

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