#visualartsource

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Melina Ausikaitis at Regards in Visual Art Source

Review by Robin Dluzen

Melina Ausikaitis, “Fall in the Leaves,” 2023, Video, 6:27, music by Melina Ausikaitis and Nate Kinsella, directed by Mike Gibisser

Melina Ausikaitis’ artworks in her show “Fall in the Leaves” feel like memories: soft, indistinct scenes punctuated by bits with weight and form. Wall-bound works are derived from the multidisciplinary artist’s own family photos — of which we see only one, reproduced in the exhibition statement. It corresponds to “Williams Wedding 1985,” wherein chunks of ceramic anchor a scene composed primarily of blocks of blue-tinged fabric sewn tightly together. The seams function as outlines, subtle delineations barely suggesting figures and objects. The ceramics — a red-and-white case of Coke, disembodied hairdos of a woman and a girl, a corner of a black milk crate — are the only true details, the only pieces that seem solid and tangible in the midst of their ethereal ground.

Between “Williams Wedding 1985” and Ausikaitis’ corresponding photograph, we are visually guided into and through the familiar sensation of accessing memories. There is a difference between deciphering what has truly been imprinted on the mind, however, and what, perhaps, only seems to be because a photograph of it exists.

Further situating memories as something apart from the actual, the display of Ausikaitis’ four fabric and ceramic pieces reinforces her scenes as constructs. In “The Crucible,” loose threads hang from the corners of a theater vignette, while in “Mark 1973,” the sewn “corner” of a room juts out at an angle from the picture plane. In all, the assembled fabric is tacked onto bare, stretched canvases peppered with tiny, hand-sewn x’s, the substrate serving as a reminder that this, the memory, is not the illusion of representation or actuality, but a picture that has been composed. All the evidence of the maker’s hand — the stitches, the hanging threads, the ceramic appliqués — establishes these works as comprising a subjective, indeed a profoundly personal pursuit.

The exhibition shares its title with both a video piece (directed by Mike Gibisser) and the song featured within it (co-authored by the artist and Nate Kinsella). In the video, Ausikaitis re-enacts her own experience with hypnosis from over a decade ago. Through the course of the episode, the artist seemingly plays dead, her tongue hanging out of the corner of her mouth. She laughs exuberantly, and also sobs. The film is composed of several long shots, with Ausikaitis’ face giving the only evidence of the suggestions being conjured behind her closed eyes. At one point, she mouths the words to the song playing over the scene, the lyrics referencing the myth of Artemis and Actaeon — invoking the idea that seeking and glimpsing might not lead towards anything but oblivion.

Together, the video and Ausikaitis’ pictures provide an allegory for the pursuit of memory recall. While truth may seem like the objective or destination behind this pursuit, perhaps achieving truth is as futile as it is subjective. And while they might even trigger real emotions in the process, maybe impressions and suggestions are all that truly remains.  

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Alex Chitty at Patron Gallery in Visual Art Source

Review by Robin Dluzen

Alex Chitty, “Like a Mule Through Honey,” 2022, porcelain bowls, spoons, cast concrete, plastic horse, brass, honey dripper, various woods, cotton furniture webbing, powder coated steel, 40 3/4 x 31 1/2 x 8 1/2”

Continuing through January 28, 2023

“She had her ceramics studio in the laundry room,” Chicago artist Alex Chitty said at her exhibition opening. Chitty explained that this show, titled “Figs break open of themselves,” is connected to a recent foray into her genealogy, and what she’s learned about the various creative practices of the women in her family. While maintaining a studio in the home is not at all uncommon, for female artists it can also be fraught, relegating one’s creative ambitions to the back room in favor of the domestic. But Chitty’s own works are not simply a feminist critique; they are a manifestation of and investigation into the duality of home life and art-making — an ever-looming conundrum that weighs disproportionately on women.

Tables and tabletops comprise Chitty’s exhibition, wall bound or flipped vertically to become a kind of picture plane for her three-dimensional vignettes. The artist’s grandmother’s kitchen table is spliced between the segments of the diptych, “In Other Words.” In “Lush Understory,” another worn wooden tabletop is layered in front of a hanging button-up shirt and beneath a black and white photograph of a woman painting with four arms, all captured at different moments in her brushstroke. In these assemblages, domestic objects, such as glass coasters and fake fruit, are recognizable, but oddly recontextualized, painted, altered or embedded into contiguous surfaces. These, along with details like tiny chess pieces and miniature figurines tucked into crevices or perched on outcroppings, invite the eye to peer more closely, so as to reassess what we might have assumed was taking place on these familiar planes.

There is an unfinished quality to Chitty’s assemblages, with melted cups, chalk marks, a dotted scissor cut line across a cast plaster grapefruit, all coming together at random. A honey dripper from out of the blue, and so many metal and wood rods as the warp to the weft of her furniture webbing in “Like a Mule Through Honey” all feels as though it might have occurred while the maker was in the middle of doing of something else: building, binding, dismantling, collecting. These tables may have been sites for suppers or piles of laundry. But the very fact of their aesthetic deployment suggests that they could have been witness to a different kind of work. Taken together with the various trappings of a certain class of domesticity, the evidence of making imbues these pieces with the potential of works-in-progress, as well as the potency of possibilities unrealized.

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Bibiana Suarez at NMPRAC in Visual Art Source

Bibiana Suarez, "De: Lata(What Gives Us Away)," National Museum of Puerto Rican Arts and Culture, Chicago, Illinois

Continuing through August 1, 2022 

by Robin Dluzen

Bibiana Suárez looks at branding with a critical eye, in particular the visual marketing of Hispanic/Latinx food products. Her current exhibition, “De: Lata (What Gives Us Away),” addresses the depictions of women on food packaging, their images often put in service of evoking “authenticity,” exotification, nostalgia, and tradition to mobilize a person to make a purchase. Suárez’s works here are Pop in their style, embracing the formal aspects of her subject matter, though her representational prowess is also evidenced in the individualized portraits of real women placed where their fictitious counterparts would have been.  The works in “De: Lata” contrast with the stereotype that a woman’s domain is limited to the kitchen, one that is still embraced within food brands’ marketing strategies. The sitters in Suárez’s pieces are depicted to highlight all manner of careers and life stories: Poet Juana Iris Goergen; artist María Martínez-Cañas; educator and researcher of Latinx LGBTQ+ communities, Lourdes Torres; Gladys Rosa-Mendoza, a designer and visual strategist; painter Cándida Alvarez; and a trio including Dolce Orocio, Antonia Marroquín, and the artist’s sister, Marinés Suárez, women whose unique personal histories are captured in the compositions of their portraits.

Bibiana Suárez, "La Fiera (Untamed)," 2021-2022,acrylic on canvas, 86 x 65." Photo: Tom Van Eynde The exhibition text by Olga U. Hererra, PhD. explains that Suárez’s sitters collaborate with the artist on their likenesses. With this agency, the resulting paintings feel free of the confines of the male gaze. In “La Fiera (Untamed),” distinguished professor of Latin American and Latino Studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago, María de los Ángeles Torres, is not smiling, submissive or particularly welcoming, unlike the illustrated women from the food packaging. The professor seems to regard the viewer sideways, her mouth set firmly, her eyebrows arched skeptically. Her authoritative gaze is powerful, effectively nullifying the issue of objectification. Torres doesn’t invite you to look at her so much as she dares you to. And while this portrait, and the others, are indeed breaks from the stereotypical relationship between women and food, Suárez puts imagery of food to a different use: to symbolize aspects of her sitters’ histories or characteristics. Below Torres’ visage is a Seder plate topped with rice and beans, combining her Cuban heritage and the Judaism of her family.

Bibiana Suárez, "La Fajona (The Hard Worker)," 2021-2022, acrylic on canvas, 49 1/8 x 75 1/4." Photo: Tom Van Eynde There is a single piece in “De: Lata” that does not contain a representational female likeness, and it is Suárez’s own self-portrait. “La Suárez (Gandulera Rubia)” (2005-2011) is the earliest piece in the exhibition, an inkjet print on aluminum, making it the work that most closely resembles the kinds of graphics the artist scrutinizes. A photograph of pigeon peas (used in arroz con gandules, Puerto Rico’s national dish) is emblazoned with the artist’s surname, as well as her date of birth and her “net weight.” In the presence of Suárez’s recent portraits, this piece seems particularly wry and ironic, with Suárez “marketing” herself like something that is to be consumed. Simultaneously, “La Suárez (Gandulera Rubia)'' is imbued with declarative power, asserting her physical existence with the irrefutable facts that ground her as a flesh-and-blood woman, not some formulaic cliche.

Installation view of Bibiana Suárez, “De: Lata (What Gives Us Away),"at the National Museum of Puerto Rican Arts & Culture, Chicago, Illinois. Photo: Tom Van Eynde Complexity is key throughout the works of “De: Lata.” Suárez peppers these portraits with plenty of blatant visual cues that speak to her sitters’ stories: the black Puerto Rican flag on Rosa-Mendoza’s shoulder; the photo corner that denotes Martínez-Cañas’ profession; the airplane in Torres’ canvas signifying Operación Pedro Pan. However, there are just as many cues that would evade us, if not for the artist providing some explanation. The image of a dry cleaner’s hanger recalls the place where Suárez and Orocio first met. Rosa-Mendoza’s space suit symbolizes her mother’s childhood ambitions for her. As much as Suárez has “branded” each of these women in a manner that celebrates their accomplishments and individuality, the ambiguous clues serve as a reminder that a woman’s biography is not something to be consumed in its entirety by whomever wants it. There is also tremendous power in details kept intimate.

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Review: Mike Rea and Casey Whittier at Cleaner Gallery in Visual Art Source

No Body: New Work by Mike Rea and Casey Whittier by Robin Dluzen

Casey Whittier, “Proof: We,” 2022, cast glass, 8 x 8 x 8”. Photo Credit: T. Maxwell Wagner

Cleaner Gallery, Chicago, Illinois Continuing through February 19, 2022

In “No Body,” Kansas City artist Casey Whittier and Chicagoan Mike Rea realize an unlikely pairing of absurdity and serious craft. Here, woodworking (Rea’s) and ceramic and glass (Whittier’s) are the materials for objects and imagery of a very personal nature. While in the past both sculptors have created highly realistic facsimiles of vernacular objects, in “No Body” both Whittier and Rea have shrugged off hyper-realism. The intentionally unpolished finish of these pieces underscores the process of their fabrication, and the relationship between the artist’s hand and the intimate nature of that which is depicted.

Mike Rea, "Garter Harness/The Doors, Fan," 2021, wood, paper, ink, epoxy resin, spray paint, interior oil paint, 64 x 52"

Whittier’s pieces represent the kinds of things that are worn often, and close to the body. Baseball caps and eyeglasses are rendered in dense, cast glass, capturing the textural nuances of that which they index: tiny bolts at the hinges of the temples, the folds of mesh backs, the relief stitching of a John Deere logo. A t-shirt hangs from a steel post in the wall, the garment — with “All Vintage Guitars go to Heaven” emblazoned across the chest — is crafted from delicate, interlocking loops of clay. These objects feel fragile, as if the preciousness of someone’s well-worn items has been transferred into, and even accentuated by the fineness of the media into which they have been cast. Whittier’s shirt, glasses and hats seem uniquely specific to someone, although it’s her cast glass sets of teeth that have singular auras. In “Proof: We” and “I and You,” sets of top and bottom teeth are stacked upon each other, suggesting an orthodontic retainer or a mouthguard as a potential mold for the cast. In Whittier’s hands, what is essentially a dental record is also a profoundly poetic gesture of intimacy.

Whittier’s sentimentality is counterbalanced by Rea’s sublime absurdity. Several large-scale works on paper are rendered using a mosaic-like method, with tiny squares of wood scrap adhered to gessoed paper. In “Coda Chrome Away” and other works the wooden pieces are colored in with squares of ink. Up close, these works have an earthy, timeless quality, the rough, gessoed paper contrasting the geometry of the wooden tiles and their velvety smooth surfaces. They feel like studies in material and abstraction, enough to lose yourself in their seriousness before realizing what it is you’re looking at. These are not abstractions, after all, but images of strappy leather gear binding up invisible bodies of negative space. “Garter Harness / The Doors, Fan,” and “Back View / Venus of Somewhere in Germany” feel campy and playful. They are triple-framed in wood of various tones, as if to “triple down” on the seriousness of Rea’s craftsmanship.

“No Body” is a lot of fun, with its unexpected dualities of high and low, the vernacular and the refined, earnestness and absurdity. However, there is a palpable melancholy surrounding it all. The leather in Rea’s images is wrapped around empty space; the hats and glasses of Whittier’s castings reverberate with the energy of the body that had, at one time, worn them. The fact that there are no bodies here, consistent with the exhibition’s title, makes one wonder whether, in non-pandemic times, this absence would feel so acute as it does right now.

Casey Whittier, “Tractor Time,” 2022, cast glass scraps, 6 x 7 x 11 1/2”. Photo Credit: T. Maxwell Wagner

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Review: Tony Fitzpatrick at Cleve Carney Museum of Art in Visual Art Source

Review by Robin Dluzen

Continuing through January 31, 2022

In terms of his notoriety, Tony Fitzpatrick’s creative output and his personality go hand-in-hand. And so, when this iconic Chicago artist announces that this exhibition, “Jesus of Western Avenue,” is his final solo museum show, those of us who know the man believe that he means it. Fitzpatrick’s is a wide-reaching creative life, with visual art, books, poetry, articles, plays, album covers and television characters under his belt. So his decision to take himself out of this particular portion of the art world game is meaningful precisely because he is at the top of his game. Fitzpatrick, by his own account, is removing himself from the equation to make room for historically and systematically underrepresented artists. Over the years, the artist’s generosity has often taken the form of access — to fine art for the public and to meaningful opportunities for emerging artists; and Fitzpatrick’s affinity for access makes its way into his visual artwork, as well. His practice features a specific sort of Midwestern Americana, blending the aesthetics of comics, vintage advertising, matchbooks, prayer cards, snippets of sheet music and Chicago-specific iconography. It’s a vernacular that allows so many different kinds of viewers an entree into the work.

Tony Fitzpatrick, “The Scavenger Searching for Jesus of Western Avenue,” 2020, mixed media

The works in “Jesus of Western Avenue,” mainly produced during the past decade, vary in subject matter but are remarkably consistent in style. Fitzpatrick’s aesthetic is hard-edged and gritty, with a Pop sensibility that is decidedly more blue collar and Imagist than slick and Warholian. An aura of the past permeates these works on paper (most are part drawing, part collage), though Fitzpatrick wields it in a way that stops short of nostalgia. There’s no longing or sentimentality here, and Fitzpatrick is pandering to no one. It is a past that feels quite alive.

In “Western Avenue (Street of Crocodiles)” (2021), caped superheroes, pinup girls and Dick Tracy-type characters with cigarettes dangling from their lips commingle with contemporary fast food and gas station signs atop a drawn grid resembling the layout of Chicago’s streets. Throngs of tiny, cut-out comic book characters in “Humboldt Park Winter Juncos” (2021) fill the background behind the carefully rendered birds of the piece’s title. In these works, like most others in the exhibition, a patchwork of everyday emblems of the past ground Fitzpatrick’s subjects, much like the way in which we lead contemporary lives in and around the historical remnants that shape Chicago.

Tony Fitzpatrick, “Humboldt Park Winter Juncos (I, Apostle of this Radiant Place, Cast my Bread on your Water),” 2021, mixed media

As much as Fitzpatrick focuses on the familiar, his works are never obvious. Even the smallest details in these works (some of the cut-out, collaged figures are less than an inch high), are curiosities. In “Humboldt Park Tern (Longing for the Sea)” (2021), tiny cherubs sport kitten heads on their shoulders, while grinning skulls replace faces of the saints in their ovoid portraits. A spindly tree in the background of “Monster Bird Deep in the Brick Heart of Chicago” (2015) has miniscule raw steaks speared upon its branches, dripping the blood that dots the negative space of the entire piece.

  The revelations here are not all dark, though. While Fitzpatrick has incorporated animals of all kinds as the primary subjects and symbols of many pieces from this decade, his pandemic collages are indicative of a newly acquired habit: birding. Flora and fauna are not usually what comes to mind when thinking about the dense, man-made grid that is the city of Chicago, but here Fitzpatrick catalogs the avian life of Chicago’s green spaces like an urban Audubon. Humboldt Park, the 200-acre park in the vicinity of the artist’s stomping grounds, figures largely, its name emblazoned across the pieces. Terns, herons, juncos and woodpeckers are among the species immortalized, their unique likenesses rendered carefully and with haloes about their heads, both at-home in and in contrast to the density of the drawn city grid in the background and its crowded occupants.

Tony Fitzpatrick, “Humboldt Park Winter Heron (Among the Opera of Demons),” 2021, drawing, collage, watercolor, ink, gouache, colored pencil and assorted ephemera on paper.

There is so much packed into each of Fitzpatrick’s pieces that viewing them is a lengthy but engaging process. It’s not just the sheer volume of detail that holds our attention. However imaginative these details may be, none of the chaos is random. Seeing so many stylistically similar pieces in one place makes it so much more clear how Fitzpatrick has taken a vernacular visual language, one that we’re so familiar with, and parlayed that into a lexicon that’s specific to him. From piece to piece, motifs recur: the hanging meats, strings of pennants, crossword-puzzle-like blocks, strips of cut-up matchbooks framing the scenes. What are the radial, circular forms overlaying the hearts of each of his birds, punctuating the space around his crocodiles, or reiterating the symmetry of his Green Mill sign? Roulette wheels? Dart boards? The sunbursts of Mid-Century decor? The incorporation of such elements is too regular to not be symbolic, though it feels like one could just keep looking and wondering, and perhaps never really crack that code.

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Review: Karen Reimer, “Sea Change” at Monique Meloche in Visual Art Source

Continuing through August 14, 2021

The “Shoretime Spaceline” series, cited in the titles of Karen Reimer’s three large fabric pieces in “Sea Change,” references the artist’s 2016 exhibition at Hyde Park Art Center. There, Reimer had installed an enormous fabric construction that resembled undulating clouds from a vantage point on the ground, and rolling waves from the balcony above. The works in her current exhibition are repurposed from that giant piece — itself a composite of so many repurposed fabrics, all indigo dyed in various tones and hues of blue. Scaled down from that original spectacle, the patchwork material is something completely different here, formally and conceptually.

Finished around the edges and fully backed, the three largest pieces in “Sea Change” are quilts. Whereas quilts, as an art form, often embody notions of comfort and security, Reimer infuses hers with a stark contrast, embroidering terrifying truths upon their surfaces. Rendered in glossy floss, small illustrations are stitched among the patches, outlining the Great Lakes Basin, the widely fluctuating lake levels of the region, and a graph of sea levels pitching sharply upwards. This combination of homey, worn tablecloths, satin-striped bed sheets, lightweight denim and chambray, and the cold hard facts of climate change, merges the personal and the global, the human experience and the environment. Additionally, the quilts carry the sublime irony in imagining covering or wrapping oneself up in the evidence of our own mistakes and the seemingly insurmountable obstacles that have developed as a result.

Karen Reimer, “Great Lakes and Basin,” from the “Shortime Spaceline” series, 2021, embroidery on fabric, 102 1/2 x 70 x 3” Alongside the quilts are smaller swaths of fabric in which Reimer uses a different tactic in her subversion of the familiar and the domestic in favor of her environmental messaging. Here, the artist takes cues from the formal details of her chosen fabrics, seamlessly integrating them into her embroidered illustrations. Bits of a peaceful, watercolor-like forest scene printed on cotton become the green toxic algae blooms in a blue-threaded map of Lake Erie. Thin red lines punctuating a green plaid swath intersect lower-mid Michigan like a crosshair in “Average Maximum Temp.” Two tones of blue dyed scraps come together to delineate the water line that is also spanned by embroidered icebergs. The image illustrates the enormous increase in surface melt after 2005, a fact incorporated into the work’s title. Not only does this piece speak explicitly to the crisis of the melting icebergs, but it also makes the metaphor of the iceberg especially potent: there’s often so much more going on than what initially appears to be.

What makes Reimer’s work so ingenious is not so much the message she delivers, but the way she delivers it. The cool, calming blue hues, the soft fabrics, and the nostalgic prints are what we see first. When one leans in for a closer look, to read the tiny, stitched letters, numbers and graphs, that’s when one’s viewing experience and understanding of the work changes entirely. Reimer plays upon a collective comfort zone, beckoning us with the comfortable and familiar, before yanking us right out of it by delivering the kinds of urgent information that should be making us all profoundly uncomfortable.

Karen Reimer, "Massive Algae Blooms in Lake Erie,"2020, embroidery on fabric, 31 x 26 1/2"

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Review: Maggie Crowley, “Playmate” and Joanne Aono, “Harvesting Ethnic Roots”

by Robin Dluzen

Joanne Aono, "Harvesting Ethnic Roots,” 2021, graphite, colored pencil, marker, crop cover cloth, wood, paint, cord, 8 x 17 x 19 feet Hyde Park Art Center, and boundary, Chicago, Illinois Continuing through June 5, 2021

Affixed to stretcher bars, or hanging from rods and pins, the silk substrates of Maggie Crowley’s gouache paintings and constructions set the tone for her solo exhibition, “Playmate.” Crowley’s silk is crushed, folded and creased, exaggerating the way gallery lighting bounces off the surface, asserting the works’ presence and physicality. More so does the silk underscore the narrative content of her works: it reflects light in a way very similar to that of the hi-vis reflective piping that is a staple of safety workwear. In “Playmate,” Crowley highlights the labor that is often judged as being “invisible,” not just by pointing out the essentialness and dignity of the work, but by capturing the nuances of the lives associated with it. Workwear and PPE feature prominently as Crowley’s subject matter. In works like “Metra Worker on Easter,” “Streets and Sanitation Employee,” and “Receptive, Cooperative, Dependable,” the artist paints portraits of workers, their yellow and orange safety vests rendered so as to draw focus to the motions of their wearers. One vest ripples as a worker lunges to the side, hand outstretched; another creases as a wearer cranes their neck while ascending a ladder; yet another twists around to the side as someone pauses to rest a gloved hand on a hip. As much as these portraits make visible the laborers and the labors they perform, it’s not simply the depictions of what happens on the job site that make “Playmate” so affecting. Amongst Crowley’s portraits, and other imagery of work jackets, trucks and scrubs, are other still-lifes and vignettes that have little-to-nothing to do with the labor, but might have very much to do with the individual performing the labor, and those around them. In particular, imagery like a fishing tackle box, the bouquet in “Anniversary,” and “Paper Snowflake” speak to leisure, occasions and loved ones. 

In her artist statement, Crowley explains that she is the daughter of a hairdresser and an ironworker, and perhaps it is exactly that proximity that makes her vantage point so dimensional. “Playmate” is a holistic picture of a life sustained and enriched by the fruits of manual skilled labor. Crowley’s exhibition is humanizing and personalizing, and is on display at an ideal moment amidst the pandemic —right when we all need to be reminded of and refocused on such things. 

Maggie Crowley, "Streets and Sanitation Employee,"2020, gouache on silk, 14 x 11." Photo by Robin Dluzen The blue-collar work that keeps a city functioning is only one example of the labors that have been taken for granted while the rest of the population is safe in quarantine. Joanne Aono’s exhibition, “Harvesting Ethnic Roots,” highlights another: agriculture. Where Crowley focuses on individuals, presenting laborers as visible and whole, Aono mines the histories of communities, shedding light on those who have shaped what we grow and what we consume. 

Maggie Crowley, "Equipment of the Earth (for a bartender)," 2021, gouache on silk construction, 92 x 78." Photo by Robin Dluzen

Maggie Crowley, "Invisible Glove," 2020, silkblend construction, 9 x 9." Photo by Robin Dluzen “Harvesting Ethnic Roots” is an installation of large-scale drawings on garden fabric, hung from the ceiling in three rows, encouraging us to walk among the pieces. Aono’s exhibition is on display at boundary — one of a handful of Chicago’s backyard gallery spaces that serve as a crucial site for artistic experimentation, and as an informal and accessible venue in which to see contemporary art. Aono’s research into the ethnic makeup of Morgan Park (the far south side neighborhood where the gallery is located) determined the imagery of her drawings and the order in which they are layered in space. In the back of the room, life-size renderings of strawberries, corn and wild rice represent the foodstuffs of Native American cultures; in the middle are those which were introduced with the European settlers, like cabbage and wheat; in the front are the sweet potatoes, okra and collard greens cultivated by Black Americans. Depending on where a viewer stands, one can see the hanging garden rows separately and distinct from one another, or as a single unit of blended layers.

Joanne Aono, "Harvesting Ethnic Roots” (detail)

However, it is the inclusion of another of Aono’s artworks installed outside the gallery that drives the point of her whole exhibition home. The word “HARVEST” is spelled out in seeds of different tones atop a low platform. As the neighborhood birds and critters help themselves to the seeds, a quote from activist Fannie Lou Hamer is revealed on the platform’s face: “If you give a hungry man food, he will eat it. If you give him land, he will grow his own food.” With Hamer’s words reverberating in your mind, the medium of Aono’s drawings is especially potent. The garden fabric, or row cover, is almost transparent, so airy and delicate is its weave; the fabric’s intended use is protective, shielding plants from heat, frost and insects. This is a time of multiple crises — the pandemic (and its effect on supply chains), climate change, and cultural upheaval — and in “Harvesting Ethic Roots,” Aono uses these two traits, the delicate and the protective, to illustrate the state and cultural weight of agriculture in America, and how we might regard it.

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“The MCA Blows It” in Visual Art Source

by Robin Dluzen

Diane Christensen and Jeanne Dunning with Steve Dawson, “Birth Death Breath,”2016, inflatable opera. Installation view, Elmhurst Art Museum, Elmhurst, Illinois "The Long Dream"  Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, Illinois, continuing through May 2, 2021

Wrapping the corner walls of the entrance to “The Long Dream” at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago are the names of the more than 70 local artists exhibiting work in the exhibition. Some of these names belong to my friends and colleagues, and there are others I don’t personally know but greatly admire. Rather than feeling vicariously buoyed by reading these names, and appreciating the institutional recognition of a segment of Chicago’s arts community, I instinctively flinched. It should be noted that I did not come to the MCA on this day in possession of the optimistic curiosity with which I typically approach an exhibition. The MCA and “The Long Dream” are at the center of a labor crisis, as extensively reported by Kerry Cardoza in The Chicago Reader (March 3, 2021). With my facemask and timed-entry ticket, I came to find out what happens to a show, stockpiled with excellent and timely work, when site-specific ethical turmoil takes over as context. My flinch at the threshold of the exhibition was the result of knowing that the artists whose names are on the wall must feel involuntarily complicit in the controversy. The curatorial statement of “The Long Dream” explains that the show, which borrows its title from the Richard Wright novel, highlights artists whose work “offers us ways to imagine a more equitable and interconnected world” — an institutional attempt to acknowledge the revolutionary zeitgeist. That would be all well and good were it not for the fact that MCA staff (organized under the moniker MCAccountable) has been calling on the museum to address its own racism, ableism and poor labor practices, especially in the midst of operating during COVID, only to face layoffs twice — the latest round in January, coinciding with a sickly hypocritical article by MCA Director Madeleine Grynsztein in Art in America (January 22, 2021) bragging about diversity practices at the MCA and how “[w]hen most institutions were furloughing their front-facing employees, we went in the opposite direction.” Cardoza pointed out, however, that “[t]he day prior, the MCA laid off 41 employees.” MCAccountable’s open letters from July 16 and August 21, and one from the artists in “The Long Dream” presented to the Director on March 11 outline the museum’s offenses, and the demands made by the artists and staff. 

Some of the artists slated to exhibit in “The Long Dream” — Maria Gaspar, Aram Han Sifuentes, Folayemi Wilson and the For the People Artists Collective — withdrew in protest before the show even opened. Initially, I worried for the artists in “The Long Dream”: that the show’s context had been proven a sham, and subsequently, that powerful work about racial justice, disability activism and LGBTQ+ equity would be grievously undermined. Indeed, the pretense that the museum was in solidarity with these causes was shattered, and an atmosphere of irony, sadness and outrage over the current situation envelops the show. But the convictions within the works reverberate. 

Artworks that hinge upon elements of vulnerability thrive in the exhibition’s shifted context. “Birth, Death, Breath,” an installation by Diane Christiansen and Jeanne Dunning with Steve Dawson, features a collection of seasonal, inflatable lawn ornaments: snowmen, ducks dressed in hunting gear, and parts of various animals frankenstein-ed together. All rise and fall as their air supply fluctuates in cadence with original songs. The artists take advantage of how these colorful, smiling forms bob, almost lifelike when filled with air; and the ominous way that they collapse when their supply is cut. Lyrics like “I will not survive / Where am I going / Where will I be” underscore threads of fear and uncertainty — feelings that have become all too familiar, especially during the pandemic when crucial lifelines and livelihoods suddenly became tenuous. While Christiansen and Dunning keep us at a conceptual arms length as we watch a narrative play out, Derrick Woods-Morrow closes the distance between the audience and the work. In “How much does this moment weigh for you?”, the mangled mass of a compressed police car is suspended from a steel frame by chains. The rusted heap no longer bears any resemblance to a Crown Victoria, but the police spotlight, aimed head-height, is unmistakable. In the darkened room, the sudden, blinding light stuns and disarms. Stepping away from the spotlight, it’s easier to focus on the disembodied voices in the room: two men tentatively discussing race, queerness, law enforcement and their shared memories of childhood. Woods-Morrow doesn’t simply tell a story here, he puts us right in the middle of it, both physically and emotionally. The sensation of being in someone else’s shoes takes us one step beyond mere awareness, and closer to understanding. 

Amanda Williams, “What black is this you say?—‘You thought getting Obama elected meant you could take a break from blackness’—black (study for 08.09.20),” 2020, watercolor on paper, 7 x 10”

But the piece in “The Long Dream” that resonates the most, in light of the collapse of the exhibition’s original intention, is Amanda Williams’ “What black is this you say?” series of watercolors on paper. Her series began in response to “Blackout Tuesday,” the social media event of June 2, 2020, in which Instagram feeds were flooded with blank, black squares by individuals, institutions and corporations alike, in what everyone thought was solidarity with Black Lives Matter. Quickly, it was realized that these posts stifled the crucial communication that was taking place online with the #blm hashtag, and people everywhere seethed at the superficiality of the gesture. Williams, known for her mastery of color in form and concept, began her own Instagram project that day, coupling abstractions of varying tones and palettes of black with captions that added humanity and individuality to a trend that was otherwise populated with flatness and sameness. The artist translated her posts into the small, intimate paintings seen here. And, with the addition of handwritten inscriptions, such as “I cain’t go swimming today, I just got my hair done black”; “Obama break from blackness black,” they capture the best aspect of social media — the window into someone else’s everyday — while infusing it with the slow-paced contemplation of abstract painting.

A portion of what Williams so adeptly addresses in this work is in close parallel to what is playing out at the MCA and beyond: jumping on the chance to show public solidarity in theory, while continuing to actively harm individuals and disregard their experiences. There have been other major exhibitions in recent years in which artists have withdrawn work in protest of morality issues at the institution. The 2019 Whitney Biennial is one example. But the hypocrisy of “The Long Dream” is particularly explicit. The museum fails on the precise grounds by which the exhibition was conceived. In bringing together 70 artists with the most concrete of convictions, how could this NOT have happened? In hindsight, it seems inevitable that the museum would try, and fail. I checked my Twitter feed on my walk back to the El on the Friday afternoon of my MCA visit. The algorithm brought me Kerry Cardoza’s Tweet from several hours prior: a link to the open letter from the artists, with the announcement that 57 of them would be withdrawing their work from the exhibition. This story is not yet complete. But hopefully what started as an exhibition will be remembered as a sea change, with artists and workers serving as the catalyst.