“Respect: Thornton Dial and Gee’s Bend” at Russell Bowman Art Advisory

Published in Time Out Chicago, November 23, 2011

Thornton Dial has worked in bricklaying, steelwork and at a cement plant in his hometown of Bessemer, Alabama. The 83-year-old artist’s assemblages—held together by industrial sealing compound and wire fencing—draw on his background in industrial manufacturing. What looks like a baseball pitcher in The Man That Can Play Any Game is surrounded by strips of black rubber tire, as well as swirling blocks of bright blue, yellow and red lines.

Dial’s piece hangs across from Mary Lee Bendolph’s quilt Stripes and Housetop Blocks (pictured), and it reflects both the vibrant primary colors and the blocked linear patterns in her work. Bendolph belongs to the Gee’s Bend Quilters Collective, a group of women who forged their own unique aesthetic in the small towns of Rehoboth and Boykin, Alabama. In this show’s three quilts, they exhibit a sense of color, shape and line on par with artists such as Mark Rothko and Piet Mondrian.

Some of Dial’s emotional drawings are on view as well, such as Projects, in which friendly faces and nesting birds cluster under peaked roofs.(The assemblages seem overworked in comparison.) Dial’s work vibrates on the wall, in contrast to the Gee’s Bend quilts’ stoic constructivism.

Dial and the Gee’s Bend Quilters share a champion in collector and curator William Arnett, though the gallery doesn’t highlight Arnett’s attempts to stop them from being pigeonholed as “outsider artists.” He believes they’re part of an aesthetically unified and historically significant art movement: the vernacular visual arts of the African-American South. Bendolph’s incredible color aquatint etching To Honor Mr. Dial (2005) makes clear the artists’ connection is not just aesthetic.

- CW

“Re: Chicago” at the DePaul Art Museum

Published in Time Out Chicago, October 19, 2011

For “Re: Chicago,” the first exhibition in the DePaul Art Museum’s new building, DPAM asked members of the local art scene, “Who are the notable Chicago artists of past and present?”

Historians, podcasters, curators and critics chime in, selecting many familiar artists. The show includes one of Henry Darger’s ubiquitous paintings of the Vivian Girls and a maquette of Richard Hunt’s Midway Airport sculpture Flight Forms. But one professor makes a vehement case for now-obscure 19th-century presidential portraitist George Healy, represented by a subdued painting of an unidentified man. A 1920s SAIC graduate,Macena Barton, created the full-frontal nude self-portrait hanging opposite: a bold mixture of strength and sensuality.

The number of pieces by contemporary up-and-comers, particularly those singled out by recently acquired stickers, demonstrates DPAM’s commitment to working Chicago artists.Juan Angel Chávez’s No Campground Just Water, a seven-foot sphere of apocalyptic trash architecture, dominates the museum’s first floor. Living the Dream, an installation byRobert Davis and Michael Langlois in a small side gallery, combines references to Color Field painting, prints by László Moholy-Nagy and Aaron Siskind pulled from DPAM’s collection, and the emblems of bands Black Flag and Bad Brains in a joint homage to abstract painting and punk-rock culture.

The guest curators’ commentaries tend to have a defensive, “second city” tone, particularly when they address Chicago’s lack of influence on abstract art movements. It’s more satisfying to see this exhibition expose pockets of artistic production and innovation across the city.

-CW

“The World as Text” at the Center for Book and Paper Arts

Published in Time Out Chicago, July 13, 2011

When you enter “The World as Text” at Columbia College’s Center for Book and Paper Arts, artist John Preus’s reading room vies for your attention with the dozens of artists’ books and zines that it houses.

A collaboration with students at Columbia College and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Preus’s design relates furniture’s tension between form and function to the way we read and interpret text: Tilted tables and nightstands become bookshelves, and absurdly long legs extend two chairs almost 20 feet off the ground.

One can actually sit down in the gallery—on benches built from repurposed subway chairs—so I spent an afternoon sifting through the impressive publications that the show’s guest curators have assembled. Here are a few of my favorites:

Art-Rite no. 14, Winter 1976/77. This issue of the radical magazine Art-Rite was devoted to the art of the book. A reader poll asks, “What attracts you to artists’ books?” All of the respondents, who include John Baldessari, Sol LeWitt, Lucy Lippard and Adrian Piper, allude to accessing a community through artists’ books in a way that one can’t through other media. We can pass the books from hand to hand, take them home with us and revisit them over and over again. Artists’ books combine all the things we love about our ragged, oft-read paperbacks with the visceral experience of a work of art.

Jayson Scott Musson, Too Black for B.E.T. I & II (Free News Press), 2008. “Put down those Harry Potter books and get with this grown up shit, boy boy.” Racism, sexism and downright crudeness seem to characterize the broadsides collected in this ironic volume, but Musson’s surprise attack is integral to the reading room experience: Artists’ books lie unassumingly on shelves and tables, until we open them and are intimately confronted by hard-to-swallow ideas.

Kurt Allerslev, Mesopotamia (Organik), 2009. Okay, not all of these books can be passed from hand to hand. Allerslev’s Mesopotamia is a weighty tome more than two feet square, with thick leathery pages encrusted with yellow, orange and brown paint. Its covers are bound in the bark from a chokecherry tree that the author cut down in New York state. The few handwritten lines running along the bottom of its 12 pages tell a formless story about the origins of human mark-making, describing images that shift into text and hazy references to prehistoric cave painting, like a herd of antelopes “writing” their way across the horizon and yellow handprints. It’s a good example of how artists’ experiments can render books impractical but beautiful.

Paul Chan, Waiting for Godot in New Orleans: A Field Guide (Badlands Unlimited & Creative Time Books), 2011. Visitors can read Chan’s e-book on one of two iPad reading stations. There’s a coldness to reading on a computer screen, without the weight and texture of an actual book. But going digital allows Chan to include numerous images related to his incredible production of Samuel Beckett’s play Waiting for Godot in post-Katrina New Orleans. And even the 1970s pioneering book artists might not have dreamed of the e-book’s extreme take on portability.

Edie Fake, Gaylord Phoenix no. 5, 2010. Fake’s skills as an artist and storyteller helpGaylord Phoenix demonstrate the amazing potential of zines. Simple screenprinted pages bound by staples yield a story about self-reflection, sexuality and journeying through inner and outer worlds. Fake pushes the edge with some stellar visual ideas, fusing comics and Mayan art. He shows that zines can stay true to the essential elements of the artist’s book praised in Art-Rite, as they promote freedom of expression, community building, and an intimate connection between viewer and artist.

Center for Book and Paper Arts curator Jessica Cochran leads a tour of “The World as Text” Tuesday 19 at 6pm.

- CW

Ellen Lanyon at Printworks

Published in Time Out Chicago, May 4, 2011

Ten years ago, Ellen Lanyon created a series of pen-and-ink drawings to catalog her collection of odds and ends.In 2003, master printer Kip Gresham translated them into fine facsimile prints, publishing them in five large, fold-out books (on view at Printworks).

The artist returned to those prints to make the collages in “Index Extended,” photocopying them and arranging their elements in various combinations. The use of photocopies strips away a bit of the sacredness surrounding original art objects, giving her the freedom to form new ideas from her own visual vocabulary. Repeating certain images, surprisingly, helps. (Lanyon favors dials, scales, old engravings of exotic wildlife and flora, and kitsch such as statues of pipe-smoking animals.) An old engraving of an ACME egg grader takes on a different meaning when placed among tropical birds instead of alongside a woman in a bathing suit.

Lanyon’s collection reflects her taste for the weird and slightly gruesome. (See the purse made out of an alligator’s paw in Bodega Bay and the taxidermied frog strumming a little harp in the hilarious All the Frogs.) Yet she uses this oddball ephemera to construct some truly beautiful Surrealist scenes. Though “Index Extended” feels somewhat one-note, it should prompt visitors to learn more about Lanyon’s 60-plus years of artistic engagement with her world.

- CW